Digital Elevation Model Database W42 - A scalable System for Spatial Data

Kurzfassung

Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) provide elementary information for various application fields. From a global point of view, there are many different sources to furnish height information of the Earth's surface. These sources can be heterogeneous in coverage, as well as in resolution, information content and quality. A database aiming at the representation of world-wide DEMs has to consider these differences in the design of the system with respect to the structure and the algorithms. The DEM database W42 is a scalable spatial database system capable of holding, extracting, mosaicing, and fusing spatial data. Design aspects for this task can be specified as holding spatial data in a unique data structure and providing unique access functions to the data. These are subject of this work.