Governments use flood maps for city planning and disaster management to protect people and assets. Flood risk mapping projects carried out for these purposes generate a huge amount of modelling results. Previously, data submitted are highly condensed products such as typical flood inundation maps and tables for loss analysis. Original modelling results recording critical flood evolution processes are overlooked due to cumbersome management and analysis. This certainly has drawbacks: the ĝ€ static' maps impart few details about the flood; also, the data fails to address new requirements. This significantly confines the use of flood maps. Recent development of point cloud databases provides an opportunity to manage the whole set of modelling results. The databases can efficiently support all kinds of flood risk queries at finer scales. Using a case study from China, this paper demonstrates how a novel nD-PointCloud structure, HistSFC, improves flood risk querying. The result indicates that compared with conventional database solutions, HistSFC holds superior performance and better scalability. Besides, the specific optimizations made on HistSFC can facilitate the process further. All these indicate a promising solution for the next generation of flood maps.

Efficient spatial queries are frequently needed to extract useful information from massive nD point clouds. Most previous studies focus on developing solutions for orthogonal window queries, while rarely considering the polytope query. The latter query, which includes the widely adopted polygonal query in 2D, also plays a critical role in many nD spatial applications such as the perspective view selection. Aiming for an nD solution, this paper first formulates a convex nD-polytope for querying. Then, the paper integrates three approximate geometric algorithms – SWEEP, SPHERE, VERTEX, and a linear programming method CPLEX, developing a solution based on an Index-Organized Table (IOT) approach. IOT is applied with space filling curve based clustering and advanced querying mechanism which recursively refines hypercubic nD spaces to approach the query geometry for primary filtering. Results from experiments based on both synthetic and real data have confirmed the superior performance of SWEEP. However, the algorithm may lag behind CPLEX due to pessimistic intersection computation in high dimensional spaces. In a real application, by properly transforming a perspective view selection into a polytope query, the solution achieves a sub-second querying performance using SWEEP. In another flood risk query, SWEEP also leads the others. In general, the robust and efficient solution can be immediately used to address different polytope queries, including those abstract ones whose constraints on combinations of different dimensions are formed into a polytope model. Besides, the knowledge of high-dimensional computations acquired also provides significant guidance for handling more nD GIS issues.

Dramatically increasing collection of point clouds raises an essential demand for highly efficient data management. It can also facilitate modern applications such as robotics and virtual reality. Extensive studies have been performed on point data management and querying, but most of them concentrate on low dimensional spaces. High dimensional data management solutions from computer science have not considered the special features of spatial data; so, they may not be optimal. A Space Filling Curve (SFC) based approach, PlainSFC which is capable of nD point querying has been proposed and tested in low dimensional spaces. However, its efficiency in nD space is still unknown. Besides that, PlainSFC performs poorly on skewed data querying. This paper develops HistSFC which utilizes point distribution information to improve the querying efficiency on skewed data. Then, the paper presents statistical analysis of how PlainSFC and HistSFC perform when dimensionality increases. By experimenting on simulated nD data and real data, we confirmed the patterns deduced: for inhomogeneous data querying, the false positive rate (FPR) of PlainSFC increases drastically as dimensionality goes up. HistSFC alleviates such deterioration to a large extent. Despite performance degeneration in ultra high dimensional spaces, HistSFC can be applied with high efficiency for most spatial applications. The generic theoretical framework developed also allows us to study related topics such as visualization and data transmission in the future.

Point clouds have become one of the most popular sources of data in geospatial fields due to their availability and flexibility. However, because of the large amount of data and the limited resources of mobile devices, the use of point clouds in mobile Augmented Reality applications is still quite limited. Many current mobile AR applications of point clouds lack fluent interactions with users. In our paper, a cLoD (continuous level-of-detail) method is introduced to filter the number of points to be rendered considerably, together with an adaptive point size rendering strategy, thus improve the rendering performance and remove visual artifacts of mobile AR point cloud applications. Our method uses a cLoD model that has an ideal distribution over LoDs, with which can remove unnecessary points without sudden changes in density as present in the commonly used discrete level-of-detail approaches. Besides, camera position, orientation and distance from the camera to point cloud model is taken into consideration as well. With our method, good interactive visualization of point clouds can be realized in the mobile AR environment, with both nice visual quality and proper resource consumption.

Indoor navigation and visualization become increasingly important nowadays. Meanwhile, the proliferation of new sensors as well as the advancement of data processing provide massive point clouds to model the indoor environment in high accuracy. However, current state-of-the-art solutions fail to manage such large datasets efficiently. File based solutions often require substantial development work while database solutions are still faced with issues such as inefficient data loading and indexing. In this research, through a case study which aims to solve the problem of intermittent rendering of massive points in the context of indoor navigation, we devised and implemented an algorithm to compute the continuous Level of Detail (cLoD) where geometric and classification information are considered. Benchmarks are developed and different approaches in Oracle are tested to learn the pros and cons. Surprisingly, the flat table approach could be very efficient compared with other schemes. The crucial point lies in how to address priority of different dimensions including cLoD, classification and spatial dimensions, and avoid unnecessary scanning of the table. Writing results either to the memory or the disk constitutes major part of the time cost when large output is concerned. Conventional solutions based on spatial data objects present poor performance due to cumbersome indexing structure, inaccurate selection and additional decoding process. Besides, approximate selection in the unit of physical object is proposed and the performance is satisfactory when large amount of data is requested. The knowledge acquired could prompt the development of a novel data management of high dimensional point clouds where the classification information is involved.

Management of large hydrologic datasets including storage, structuring, clustering, indexing, and query is one of the crucial challenges in the era of big data. This research originates from a specific problem: time series extraction at specific locations takes a long time when a large multidimensional (MD) dataset is stored in the NetCDF classic or the 64-bit offset format. The essence of this issue lies in the contiguous storage structure adopted by NetCDF. In this research, NetCDF file-based solutions and a MD array database management system applying a chunked storage structure are benchmarked to determine the best solution for storing and querying large MD hydrologic datasets. Expert consultancy was conducted to establish benchmark sets, with the HydroNET-4 system being utilized to provide the benchmark environment. In the final benchmark tests, the effect of data storage configurations, elaborating chunk size, dimension order (spatio-temporal clustering) and compression on the query performance, is explored. Results indicate that for big hydrologic MD data management, the properly chunked NetCDF-4 solution without compression is, in general, more efficient than the SciDB DBMS. However, benefits of a DBMS should not be neglected, for example, the integration with other data types, smart caching strategies, transaction support, scalability, and out-of-The-box support for parallelization.