PLoS ONE (Jan 2020)

Efficient processing of raster and vector data.

  • Fernando Silva-Coira,
  • José R Paramá,
  • Susana Ladra,
  • Juan R López,
  • Gilberto Gutiérrez

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0226943
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 15, no. 1
p. e0226943

Abstract

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In this work, we propose a framework to store and manage spatial data, which includes new efficient algorithms to perform operations accepting as input a raster dataset and a vector dataset. More concretely, we present algorithms for solving a spatial join between a raster and a vector dataset imposing a restriction on the values of the cells of the raster; and an algorithm for retrieving K objects of a vector dataset that overlap cells of a raster dataset, such that the K objects are those overlapping the highest (or lowest) cell values among all objects. The raster data is stored using a compact data structure, which can directly manipulate compressed data without the need for prior decompression. This leads to better running times and lower memory consumption. In our experimental evaluation comparing our solution to other baselines, we obtain the best space/time trade-offs.