Exploratory geospatial analysis using GeoVISTA Studio: from a desktop to the Web

The main objective of the GeoVISTA Studio project is to improve geoscientific analysis by providing an environment that operationally integrates a wide range of analysis activities, including those both computationally and visually based. We argue that improving the infrastructure used in analysis has far-reaching potential to better integrate human-based and computationally-based expertise, whether locally or remotely available, and so ultimately improve scientific outcomes. The improvements to research infrastructure proposed have implications for Web-based deployment of analysis methods. This paper illustrates various features of GeoVISTA Studio, such as ease of program construction (visual programming), an open (non-proprietary) architecture, simple component-based integration and advanced deployment methods, which allow us to rapidly construct and share applications that combine geocomputation and geovisualization methods. It also demonstrates that GeoVISTA Studio can be used as both a Web GIS application and a Web GIS application builder.