Semiregular Degenerate Refinement for 3D Discrete Global Grid Systems
Date
2020-06-23
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Abstract
Recent technological advancements have led to unprecedented amounts of 3D data becoming available about the Earth. With this, technologies that facilitate the efficient integration and management of geospatial data are becoming increasingly important. Hierarchical partitionings of the surface of the Earth, known as Discrete Global Grid Systems (DGGS), have proven to be useful tools for integrating data on the Earth's surface; however, they have no native support for 3D data. Instead, a 3D version of this data structure is needed. An Earth-centric 3D DGGS that respects the spherical nature of the planet is desirable, but this approach introduces the problem of reduced cell size and compactness near the centre of the grid. In this thesis, we explore a particular class of refinement methods, which we term semiregular degenerate, as a potential solution to these issues. We propose both a modification of an existing 3D DGGS to improve its volume preservation properties and a general framework for extending any existing DGGS to the third dimension. We also derive a set of mapping functions that facilitate efficient encoding and decoding algorithms for both these methods. Grid properties and algorithm runtimes are evaluated quantitatively, and a series of use cases are used to evaluate the grid extension methodology by creating a 3D DGGS explicitly tailored for each example application.
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Keywords
discrete global grid system, 3D global grid, volume preservation, degenerate refinement
Citation
Ulmer, B. L. (2020). Semiregular Degenerate Reϐinement for 3D Discrete Global Grid Systems (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.