A geospatial cyberinfrastructure is needed to support advanced GIScience research and education activities.However,the heterogeneous and distributed nature of geospatial resources creates enormous obstacles for building a unified and interoperable geospatial cyberinfrastructure.In this paper,we propose the Geospatial Service Web(GSW)to underpin the development of a future geospatial cyberinfrastructure.The GSW excels over the traditional spatial data infrastructure by providing a highly intelligent geospatial middleware to integrate various geospatial resources through the Internet based on interoperable Web service technologies.The development of the GSW focuses on the establishment of a platform where data,information,and knowledge can be shared and exchanged in an interoperable manner.Theoretically,we describe the conceptual framework and research challenges for GSW,and then introduce our recent research toward building a GSW.A research agenda for building a GSW is also presented in the paper.
