Concepts and System Architectures for the Management of Very Large Spatial Raster Objects in a Database Framework

Abstract

The efficient management of very large spatial raster objects is becoming an important new feature of Geo-Information Systems. This paper investigates and summarises the main requirements that must be fulfilled by a spatial raster management solution. The investigations primarily focus on the management of very large raster mosaics, as a typical example for future requirements, both in terms of data volume and functionality. The aspects investigated include spatial objects access, spatial partitioning and partition indexing, multi-resolution, georeferencing and storage management. The paper then presents two system architectures which approach the problem at different levels of abstraction. The first architecture, GrIdS, is a DBMS application which investigates spatial raster management concepts and techniques available at a middleware layer. The paper discusses some of the key features of the GrIdS project, including a tile-based multi-resolution concept for very large raster mosaics. The section on GrIdS is concluded by the presentation of results which demonstrate the capabilities and limitations of this approach. CONCERT, the second architecture presented, enables the investigation of extensible database concepts and techniques supporting the efficient management of large objects, in particular spatial raster objects