Big Data and cloud computing: innovation opportunities and challenges

TLDR

Big Data has emerged as a paradigm offering abundant data and opportunities for digital earth applications, yet it poses challenges in storage, transport, processing, and mining that cloud computing addresses through shared computing, storage, networking, and analytical resources. This paper surveys the frontiers of Big Data and cloud computing, reviewing their advantages and consequences for digital earth and science domains while outlining future innovations and a research agenda. The authors conduct a comprehensive review of how cloud computing supports the transformation of Big Data’s volume, velocity, variety, and veracity into value for local to global digital earth science and applications. They observe that cloud computing and Big Data jointly enable scientific discoveries and applications, provide major solutions, drive mutual advancement, leverage spatiotemporal principles for optimization, raise socially significant geospatial challenges, and weave innovations that transform Big Data into research, engineering, and business value.

Abstract

Big Data has emerged in the past few years as a new paradigm providing abundant data and opportunities to improve and/or enable research and decision-support applications with unprecedented value for digital earth applications including business, sciences and engineering. At the same time, Big Data presents challenges for digital earth to store, transport, process, mine and serve the data. Cloud computing provides fundamental support to address the challenges with shared computing resources including computing, storage, networking and analytical software; the application of these resources has fostered impressive Big Data advancements. This paper surveys the two frontiers – Big Data and cloud computing – and reviews the advantages and consequences of utilizing cloud computing to tackling Big Data in the digital earth and relevant science domains. From the aspects of a general introduction, sources, challenges, technology status and research opportunities, the following observations are offered: (i) cloud computing and Big Data enable science discoveries and application developments; (ii) cloud computing provides major solutions for Big Data; (iii) Big Data, spatiotemporal thinking and various application domains drive the advancement of cloud computing and relevant technologies with new requirements; (iv) intrinsic spatiotemporal principles of Big Data and geospatial sciences provide the source for finding technical and theoretical solutions to optimize cloud computing and processing Big Data; (v) open availability of Big Data and processing capability pose social challenges of geospatial significance and (vi) a weave of innovations is transforming Big Data into geospatial research, engineering and business values. This review introduces future innovations and a research agenda for cloud computing supporting the transformation of the volume, velocity, variety and veracity into values of Big Data for local to global digital earth science and applications.