Handling four-dimensional geo-referenced data in environmental GIS

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Abstract
A wide range of environmental process simulations would benefit from the development of GIS able to cope with the additional dimensions of vertical space and time, and having extended spatial modelling facilities. The results of a project in the first of these areas, namely on the development of techniques for handling four-dimensional (4-D) data, are described. The key topics of data models, visualization and interpolation have been studied. Problems include the large size of some 4-D data sets, the sparseness of sampling in some dimensions compared with others, and the need to combine data sets from different sensors which may be of different dimensionalities and scales. The gridded volume data common to most environmental models are stored in a 4-D bintree form in which all dimensions are treated identically. Simple 4-D objects may also be stored, and links are provided between volume and object databases. The techniques have been implemented within a computational testbed allowing parallel processing to cope with large data sizes.

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