LIDAR is a popular remote sensing method used to examine the surface of the Earth. LIDAR instruments use light in the form of a pulsed laser to measure ranges (variable distances) and generate vast amounts of precise three dimensional point data describing the shape of the Earth. Processing large collections of point cloud data and combining them with auxiliary GIS data remain an open research problem.

3D digital city models form the basis for flow simulations (e.g. wind flow and water runoff), urban planning, under-and over-ground formation analysis, and they are very important for automated anomaly detection on man made structures. They consist of large collections of semantically rich objects which have many properties such as material and color. Such user's data structure perception is leading to complex storage schemas. The number of table relations to manage and the large data storage footprint drawbacks are then extended with the fact that not all the systems have a “real” 3D data type. In this work we would like to show our efforts to develop a new kind of Spatial Data Management System (SDBMS) where topological and geometric functionality for 3D raster manipulation will become part of the relational kernel and not an add-on. With it spatial analysis tailored to different use case scenarios is done on-demand and fast enough to support real-time interaction in modern risk management systems.

3D digital city models, important for urban planning, are currently constructed from massive point clouds obtained through airborne LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging). They are semantically enriched with information obtained from auxiliary GIS data like Cadastral data which contains information about the boundaries of properties, road networks, rivers, lakes etc.

Earth observation sciences produce large sets of data which are inherently rich in spatial and geo-spatial information. Together with live data collected from monitoring systems and large collections of semantically rich objects they provide new opportunities for advanced eScience research on climatology, urban planing and smart cities. Such combination of heterogeneous data sets forms a new source of knowledge. Efficient knowledge extraction from them is an eScience challenge. It requires efficient bulk data injection from both static and streaming data sources, dynamic adaptation of the physical and logical schema, efficient methods to correlate spatial and temporal data, and flexibility to (re-)formulate the research question at any time. In this work, we present a data management layer over a column-oriented relational data management system that provides efficient analysis of spatiotemporal data. It provides fast data ingestion through different data loaders, tabular and array based storage, and a dynamic step-wise exploration.

Earth observation sciences, astronomy, and seismology have large data sets which have inherently rich spatial and geospatial information. In combination with large collections of semantically rich objects which have a large number of thematic properties, they form a new source of knowledge for urban planning, smart cities and natural resource management. Modeling and storing these properties indicating the relationships between them is best handled in a relational database. Furthermore, the scalability requirements posed by the latest 26-attribute light detection and ranging (LIDAR) data sets are a challenge for file-based solutions. In this demo we show how to query a 640 billion point data set using a column store enriched with GIS functionality. Through a lightweight and cache conscious secondary index called Imprints, spatial queries performance on a flat table storage is comparable to traditional file-based solutions. All the results are visualised in real time using QGIS.

TELEIOS is a recent European project that addresses the need for scalable access to petabytes of Earth Observation data and the discovery and exploitation of knowledge that is hidden in them. TELEIOS builds on scientific database technologies (array databases, SciQL, data vaults) and Semantic Web technologies (stRDF and stSPARQL) implemented on top of a state of the art column store database system (MonetDB). We demonstrate a first prototype of the TELEIOS Virtual Earth Observatory (VEO) architecture, using a forest fire monitoring application as example.