DATA STRUCTURE FOR PROGRESSIVE VISUALISATION AND EDITION OF VECTORIAL GEOSPATIAL DATA

Abstract

3D mock-ups of cities are becoming an increasingly common tool for urban planning. Sharing the mock-up is still a challenge since the volume of data is so high. Furthermore, the recent surge in low-end, mobile devices requires developers to carefully control the amount of data they process. In this paper, we present a hierarchical data structure that allows the streaming of vectorial data. Loosely based on a quadtree, the structure stores the data in tiles and is organised following a weight function which allows the most relevant data to be displayed first. The relevance of a feature can be measured by its geometry and semantic attributes, and can vary depending on the application or client type. Tiles can be limited in size (number of features or triangles) for the client to be able to control resource consumption. The article also presents algorithms for the addition or removal of features in the data structure, opening the path for the interactive edition of city data stored in a database.