Working Group to be involved in. Major
technical and scientific activities of the
past year include:
Examination of a number of different
techniques for modeling spatial data, i.e.,
DIGEST, SAIF, ARC/INFO/VPF, SDTS,
etc. Work will continue in this direction
to develop a comparative study document
of the different models of vector spatial
data.
In March of 1993, presentation of a paper
at the Fifth Canadian Conference on GIS,
entitled "Development of a framework for
interoperability of a spatial database”. A
follow-up paper will be presented at the
upcoming ISPRS Commission II
Symposium in Ottawa, Canada
Working Group 1I/3 held a business
meeting during the Fifth Canadian
Conference on GIS, held in Ottawa,
Canada from March 27 - 29, 1993.
The Working Group also organized and
conducted a workshop prior to the
opening of the Fifth Canadian Conference
on GIS. The half day workshop on Object
Oriented Spatial Databases was held on
March 20, 1993, providing presentations
and demonstrations.
Working Group II/3 held a business
meeting at the Symposium of Spatial Data
Handling, held in Singapore, during
August of 1993. Among a number of
items, WG members discussed the current
issues of handling large volumes of
spatial data and made plans for the
Commission II Symposium in Ottawa
from June 6 - 10, 1994.
A discussion meeting on methods of
accessing Global Directories on
Geophysical Data-sets, was held in
September, 1993 in Ottawa, Canada.
522
Catalogue Interoperability Workshop,
April 1993
State of Science and Technology
Working Group II/3
The technology for the maintenance and
processing large volume of spatial data
continues to be a challenging problem in
computing sciences and systems
engineering. These problems are not
restricted to spatial data alone, but span
all areas where a high volume of data is
captured and requires processing.
Current database technology are very
limited in coping with the size of the data
volumes being considered here.
The problems are compounded by the fact
that most spatial data resources are legacy
data, they have a time dimension which is
very essential to maintain for subsequent
processing. The mere size of these
datasets can not be handled by traditional
database management systems, some
records such as single images may span
megabytes of disk space, and duplicating
the data set for reliability purposes is very
expensive. So far, the emergent
technologies that have been used include:
optical disk storage system, high density
magnetic tapes and digital audio tapes,
tape vaults and RAID technology and
disk stripping techniques. These are
technologies that although commercially
available are still undergoing research.
The primary focus of Working Group II/3
is addressing these problems related to
the storage and retrieval of very large
spatial data and the technology for
processing, and dissemination of large
volumes of spatial information. In this
regard, the Working Group's first year
focused on identifying research projects,
research centres and personnel around the
world involved in various research
activities related to the acquisition storage
and processing of very large volume of
spatial dat
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