Distributed Systems
As the uses of service-oriented architectures increase in the earth sciences, a new area of research opens up for the research community. Historically almost all of the earth science resources were built using specific machines and local users in mind. It has been a major challenge to access resources built by others. The only way to access such resources were to contact the person and ask him/her to provide the software and/or resources, install them on a different machine and go through so many unnecessary steps. With the advent of the service oriented architectures, scientists now can build resources that are easily shared by others without compromising their own activities. Using standard protocols such as Web Services http://www.w3.org/2002/ws/, it is possible to build service oriented geoscience applications
The SYNSEIS application that we built as part of the GEON cyberinfrastructure network is a prime example of service oriented architecture. In this application each component is built as a service. In addition to the whole system, the underlying components are also accessible to others to use in either similar or completely different applications.
