Virtual Appliances for geospatial data processing

Virtualization is increasingly taking on a key role in various systemarchitectures which follow new platform concepts like Software as a Service(SaaS). This trend addresses more instant and short-term environments andcomes with new methods and strategies for the distribution of mainly complexapplication stacks not only in large IT infrastructures. The paper presents how a socalled Virtual Appliance can be set up in order to operate in virtual serverenvironments using hypervisor software like Oracle VirtualBox. It will be shown thatthe use of standardized tools and interfaces for invoking geospatial data processingon servers brings a high level of flexibility regarding the development of clientsrequesting the services. As an example, we present the almost automaticdelineation of spatially distributed model entities that serves as a component in theIntegrated Land Management System (ILMS) [Kralisch et al., 2012].