EFFICIENT AND PRACTICAL HANDLING OF SPATIO-TEMPORAL DATA BASED ON TIME-DEPENDENT NET COMPONENTS

Abstract. The monitoring of spatio-temporal phenomena such as the movement of glaciers or volcanos produces huge amounts of data. Especially the handling of time as a fourth dimension usually requires terabytes of storage space. Therefore, an appropriate data management model for an efficient handling of such data is required and a key concept for any 3D/4D GIS. Within this paper, a comprehensive data management model is presented that optimizes the handling and storage of spatio-temporal data. The concept of time-dependent Net Components is introduced to handle regions that are monitored and modelled in individual time steps. Combined with the concept of Point Tubes the resulting data management model is used to manage spatio-temporal data based on d-simplicial complexes with dimensions d ∈ {0,1,2,3}. It is shown that the model is capable of handling various kinds of spatio-temporal applications. These include the proper handling of variable temporal discretizations of partial regions within a 4D model. The storage requirements are reduced and spatial as well as spatio-temporal operations are accelerated significantly. Critical issues such as the preservation of the net topology between time steps and the handling of boundary regions of adjacent net components can be solved.