GridletGIS - a White Paper

GridletGIS was established as a result of a workshop held at the National Institute of Environmental e-Science entitled GridGIS (Cambridge, UK, 15th-16th December 2003). Like minded people came together during one of the break-out sessions in response to the perception that much, if not all, of the emerging field of distributed, and particularly grid, computing is concerned with manipulating large volumes of data using high-powered computing facilities connected by high-speed networks. Whilst the grid-computing model is useful, the focus on technical issues clouds the real issue of delivering useful spatial1 information to as many people as possible. Consequently, GridletGIS felt grid computing had little relevance to the majority of the world’s population and was potentially another example of knowledge being restricted to an elite group. Hence, GridletGIS felt that the grid community was missing a golden opportunity to empower those members of society who do not currently have access to geo-information. This opportunity has been given impetus with the advent of low cost hardware platforms offering cheap, ‘out of the box’ Internet-ready networks suitable for deployment in classrooms and public places.