AZURE MARKETPLACE OF APPLICATIONS FOR DIVERSE ENVIRONMENTAL USE AS A SERVICE

Here, we introduce a novel system named AMADEUS, (Azure Marketplace of Applications for Diverse Environmental Use as a Service), that leverages the Microsoft Azure cloud infrastructure to support a wide range of environmental related applications. AMADEUS is a cloud based service that can be utilized by environmental researchers, system builders, and entities of geospatial interests, e.g., Environmental Protection Agents (EPA) and governmental agents, to access, query, analyze, and visualize different sets of environmental data. Microsoft Azure provides the cloud-based back end storage and computational infrastructure required by the AMADEUS system.

The architecture of AMADEUS consists of three main modules, namely, the query processing engine, the data analysis engine, and the visualization engine. For query processing, AMADEUS hosts heterogeneous datasets of environmental data in Azure tables. These data sets are gathered from partners, around the area of Tacoma, Washington USA, and they can be accessed through dispatching SQL queries. Our partners include City of Tacoma, Center for Urban Waters, Encyclopedia of Puget Sound, and Pierce County GIS Division. For data analysis, AMADEUS provides a set of tools to facilitate the study and discovery of hidden patterns in the data as well as the correlation between various combinations of data. For example, AMADEUS compiles the watersheds, rivers and land surfaces network, i.e., Triangular Irregular Network (TIN), with the chemical spill data sets to predict those areas that more likely to be affected by pollutants coming from these chemical spills. Finally, for the visualization module, we leverage the World Wide Telescope (WWT) to provide up to 4D visualization for users’ queries and analysis results.