Global Indexing of 3d Vector Geographic Features

Geographic data management is essential for development of geo-related applications and systems. Fast access to a subset of data related to an area of interest with a sufficient precision is a common need for geographic applications. The mechanism for organizing data in the database determines how geographic features can be represented, whether or not the underlying database can be distributed or how the database can be updated. This article introduces a uniform global indexing method for 3D vector geographic data. The index facilitates several properties important for geographic systems, such as fast access to features with a similar geographic location, a multi-resolution representation, a global uniform coordinate system and the avoidance of using cartographic projections. In order to avoid truly 3 dimensional spatial indexing the solution is based on a tessellation of the space using two spherical coordinates. This decreases the computational complexity and increases performance. The article presents description of main concepts of the indexing method. Introduced method has been implemented and used with real terrain data. Also example applications are considered and practical connection with an RDBMS is proposed.