CyberGIS – defined as cyberinfrastructure-based geographic information systems (GIS) – has emerged as a new generation of GIS representing an important research direction for both cyberinfrastructure and geographic information science. This study introduces a 5-year effort funded by the US National Science Foundation to advance the science and applications of CyberGIS, particularly for enabling the analysis of big spatial data, computationally intensive spatial analysis and modeling (SAM), and collaborative geospatial problem-solving and decision-making, simultaneously conducted by a large number of users. Several fundamental research questions are raised and addressed while a set of CyberGIS challenges and opportunities are identified from scientific perspectives. The study reviews several key CyberGIS software tools that are used to elucidate a vision and roadmap for CyberGIS software research. The roadmap focuses on software integration and synthesis of cyberinfrastructure, GIS, and SAM by defining several key integration dimensions and strategies. CyberGIS, based on this holistic integration roadmap, exhibits the following key characteristics: high-performance and scalable, open and distributed, collaborative, service-oriented, user-centric, and community-driven. As a major result of the roadmap, two key CyberGIS modalities – gateway and toolkit – combined with a community-driven and participatory approach have laid a solid foundation to achieve scientific breakthroughs across many geospatial communities that would be otherwise impossible.

Cyberinfrastructure (CI) represents the integrated information and communication technologies for distributed information processing and coordinated knowledge discovery, and is promising to revolutionize how science and engineering are conducted in the twenty-first century. The value of bridging CI and GIScience is significant to advance CI and benefit GIScience research and education, particularly in distributed geographic information processing (DGIP). This article presents a holistic framework that bridges CI and GIScience by integrating CI capabilities to empower GIScience research and education and establish generic DGIP services supported by CI. The framework, the TeraGrid GIScience Gateway, is based on a CI science gateway approach developed on the National Science Foundation (NSF) TeraGrid – a key element of US and world CI. This gateway develops a unifying service-oriented framework with respect to its architecture, design, and implementation as well as its integration with the TeraGrid. The functions of the gateway focus on enabling parallel and distributed processing for geographical analysis, managing the complexity of TeraGrid software environment, and establishing a Web-based GIS for the GIScience community to gain shared and collaborative access to TeraGrid-based geospatial processing services. The gateway implementation uses Web 2.0 technologies to create a highly configurable and interactive multiuser environment. Two case studies, Bayesian geostatistical modeling and a spatial statistic for detecting local clustering, are used to demonstrate the gateway functions and user environment. The service transformation for these analyses is applied to create a shared, decentralized, and collaborative geographical analysis environment in which GIScience community users can contribute new analysis services and reuse existing gateway services.