Optimal data structures for organization and retrieval of spatial data

This research will investigate optimal approaches for the storage, retrieval and dynamic updating spatial data in a distributed networked environment. Spatial data are commonly used to describe, among other applications, geographic and geospatial information. This research will investigate how to optimally organize, distribute and replicate data as to support efficient searchability and as a consequence enhance data availability. There is a strong need for this research. Large stores of spatial data now exist, including satellite (e.g. RADARSAT) imagery, geographical mapping, aerial video inspection and weather observations, with new spatial data continually being gathered. Indeed, recent advances in sensor technology have led to an increase of several orders of magnitude in the amount of data collected. These large collections can only be hosted in a distributed manner across several hosts in a networked environment, either locally or remotely. This brings a host of research questions that need to be addressed, chiefly: - The design of spatial data structures and algorithms for geographic information systems that have as low a memory footprint as possible and still allow operations such as node additions and removals, node locking, range queries to be performed efficiently. - I/O aware spatial data structures that are sensitive to varying access costs across the memory hierarchy, including issues related to the cost of distributed, remote and secondary storage. - Caching strategies for distributed spatial data structures that to coordinate paging of indexing structures in order to reduce external (network or disk) accesses given changes in user requests. - Issues of consistency, replication and recoverability in distributed massive spatial data structures. - Data management and organization of geo-spatial data in ways that maintain efficiency of access, accuracy of data, as well as the ability to distribute the data. - Design of data structures for storing massive amounts of data that can be readily distributed over a network.