Compact Querieable Representations of Raster Data

Guillermo De Bernardo, Sandra Alvarez-García, Nieves Brisaboa, Gonzalo Navarro and Oscar Pedreira

In Geographic Information Systems (GIS) the attributes of the space (altitude, temperature, etc.) are usually represented using a raster model. There are no compact representations of raster data that provide efficient query capabilities. In this paper we propose compact representations to efficiently store and query raster datasets in main memory. We experimentally compare our proposals with traditional storage mechanisms for raster data, showing that our structures obtain competitive space performance while efficiently answering range queries involving the values stored in the raster.