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A master's thesis from Aalborg University
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Indexing and Querying Spatiotemporal Raster Data

Authors

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Term

2. term

Publication year

2008

Pages

24

Abstract

Dette speciale undersøger, hvordan man kan indeksere og forespørge spatio-temporale rasterdata—data organiseret i gitterceller over rum og tid. Vi udvikler en prototype, der lader brugere stille spørgsmål til historiske nedbørsdata, f.eks. for at spore hvor vandet, der bidrog til en oversvømmelse, oprindeligt faldt. Vi implementerer tre funktionsmæssigt ens løsninger: (1) Oracle Database GeoRaster som performance-baseline; (2) lagring af hver pixels værdi sammen med dens koordinater i en tabel; og (3) som (2), men indekseret med en Hilbert rumfyldende kurve, en metode der afbilder todimensionelle gitre til én dimension og bevarer lokalitet. Vi finder, at Hilbert-baseret indeksering er uegnet, når rasterdata er sparse (mange tomme eller manglende celler), eller når man søger med små, ikke-rektangulære vinduer. GeoRaster-løsningen kræver omtrent fire gange mere lager end de to andre og har en forespørgselsydelse, der er langsommere med flere størrelsesordener.

This thesis explores how to index and query spatiotemporal raster data—data arranged in grid cells across space and time. We built a prototype application that lets users ask questions about historical precipitation, for example to trace where the water that contributed to a flood originally fell. We implemented three functionally equivalent designs: (1) using Oracle Database GeoRaster as a performance baseline; (2) storing each pixel’s value together with its coordinates in a table; and (3) the same as (2) but indexed with a Hilbert space-filling curve, a method that maps two-dimensional grids to one dimension while preserving locality. We find that Hilbert-based indexing is ill-suited when the raster is sparse (many empty or missing cells) or when queries use small, non-rectangular windows. The GeoRaster approach requires about four times more storage than the other two and delivers query performance that is slower by several orders of magnitude.

[This abstract was generated with the help of AI]