12,708 research outputs found
The combination of spatial access methods and computational geometry in geographic database systems
Geographic database systems, known as geographic information systems (GISs) particularly among non-computer scientists, are one of the most important applications of the very active research area named spatial database systems. Consequently following the database approach, a GIS hag to be seamless, i.e. store the complete area of interest (e.g. the whole world) in one database map. For exhibiting acceptable performance a seamless GIS hag to use spatial access methods. Due to the complexity of query and analysis operations on geographic objects, state-of-the-art computational geomeny concepts have to be used in implementing these operations. In this paper, we present GIS operations based on the compuational geomeny technique plane sweep. Specifically, we show how the two ingredients spatial access methods and computational geomeny concepts can be combined für improving the performance of GIS operations. The fruitfulness of this combination is based on the fact that spatial access methods efficiently provide the data at the time when computational geomeny algorithms need it für processing. Additionally, this combination avoids page faults and facilitates the parallelization of the algorithms.
A review of wildland fire spread modelling, 1990-present 3: Mathematical analogues and simulation models
In recent years, advances in computational power and spatial data analysis
(GIS, remote sensing, etc) have led to an increase in attempts to model the
spread and behvaiour of wildland fires across the landscape. This series of
review papers endeavours to critically and comprehensively review all types of
surface fire spread models developed since 1990. This paper reviews models of a
simulation or mathematical analogue nature. Most simulation models are
implementations of existing empirical or quasi-empirical models and their
primary function is to convert these generally one dimensional models to two
dimensions and then propagate a fire perimeter across a modelled landscape.
Mathematical analogue models are those that are based on some mathematical
conceit (rather than a physical representation of fire spread) that
coincidentally simulates the spread of fire. Other papers in the series review
models of an physical or quasi-physical nature and empirical or quasi-empirical
nature. Many models are extensions or refinements of models developed before
1990. Where this is the case, these models are also discussed but much less
comprehensively.Comment: 20 pages + 9 pages references + 1 page figures. Submitted to the
International Journal of Wildland Fir
Shingle 2.0: generalising self-consistent and automated domain discretisation for multi-scale geophysical models
The approaches taken to describe and develop spatial discretisations of the
domains required for geophysical simulation models are commonly ad hoc, model
or application specific and under-documented. This is particularly acute for
simulation models that are flexible in their use of multi-scale, anisotropic,
fully unstructured meshes where a relatively large number of heterogeneous
parameters are required to constrain their full description. As a consequence,
it can be difficult to reproduce simulations, ensure a provenance in model data
handling and initialisation, and a challenge to conduct model intercomparisons
rigorously. This paper takes a novel approach to spatial discretisation,
considering it much like a numerical simulation model problem of its own. It
introduces a generalised, extensible, self-documenting approach to carefully
describe, and necessarily fully, the constraints over the heterogeneous
parameter space that determine how a domain is spatially discretised. This
additionally provides a method to accurately record these constraints, using
high-level natural language based abstractions, that enables full accounts of
provenance, sharing and distribution. Together with this description, a
generalised consistent approach to unstructured mesh generation for geophysical
models is developed, that is automated, robust and repeatable, quick-to-draft,
rigorously verified and consistent to the source data throughout. This
interprets the description above to execute a self-consistent spatial
discretisation process, which is automatically validated to expected discrete
characteristics and metrics.Comment: 18 pages, 10 figures, 1 table. Submitted for publication and under
revie
Modelling potential movement in constrained travel environments using rough space-time prisms
The widespread adoption of location-aware technologies (LATs) has afforded analysts new opportunities for efficiently collecting trajectory data of moving individuals. These technologies enable measuring trajectories as a finite sample set of time-stamped locations. The uncertainty related to both finite sampling and measurement errors makes it often difficult to reconstruct and represent a trajectory followed by an individual in space-time. Time geography offers an interesting framework to deal with the potential path of an individual in between two sample locations. Although this potential path may be easily delineated for travels along networks, this will be less straightforward for more nonnetwork-constrained environments. Current models, however, have mostly concentrated on network environments on the one hand and do not account for the spatiotemporal uncertainties of input data on the other hand. This article simultaneously addresses both issues by developing a novel methodology to capture potential movement between uncertain space-time points in obstacle-constrained travel environments
Monitoring land use changes using geo-information : possibilities, methods and adapted techniques
Monitoring land use with geographical databases is widely used in decision-making. This report presents the possibilities, methods and adapted techniques using geo-information in monitoring land use changes. The municipality of Soest was chosen as study area and three national land use databases, viz. Top10Vector, CBS land use statistics and LGN, were used. The restrictions of geo-information for monitoring land use changes are indicated. New methods and adapted techniques improve the monitoring result considerably. Providers of geo-information, however, should coordinate on update frequencies, semantic content and spatial resolution to allow better possibilities of monitoring land use by combining data sets
AT-GIS: highly parallel spatial query processing with associative transducers
Users in many domains, including urban planning, transportation, and environmental science want to execute analytical queries over continuously updated spatial datasets. Current solutions for largescale spatial query processing either rely on extensions to RDBMS, which entails expensive loading and indexing phases when the data changes, or distributed map/reduce frameworks, running on resource-hungry compute clusters. Both solutions struggle with the sequential bottleneck of parsing complex, hierarchical spatial data formats, which frequently dominates query execution time. Our goal is to fully exploit the parallelism offered by modern multicore CPUs for parsing and query execution, thus providing the performance of a cluster with the resources of a single machine. We describe AT-GIS, a highly-parallel spatial query processing system that scales linearly to a large number of CPU cores. ATGIS integrates the parsing and querying of spatial data using a new computational abstraction called associative transducers(ATs). ATs can form a single data-parallel pipeline for computation without requiring the spatial input data to be split into logically independent blocks. Using ATs, AT-GIS can execute, in parallel, spatial query operators on the raw input data in multiple formats, without any pre-processing. On a single 64-core machine, AT-GIS provides 3× the performance of an 8-node Hadoop cluster with 192 cores for containment queries, and 10× for aggregation queries
Remote Sensing Information Sciences Research Group, Santa Barbara Information Sciences Research Group, year 3
Research continues to focus on improving the type, quantity, and quality of information which can be derived from remotely sensed data. The focus is on remote sensing and application for the Earth Observing System (Eos) and Space Station, including associated polar and co-orbiting platforms. The remote sensing research activities are being expanded, integrated, and extended into the areas of global science, georeferenced information systems, machine assissted information extraction from image data, and artificial intelligence. The accomplishments in these areas are examined
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