Geographic Raster Data, Spatial Database Storage Management Studies

Geo-Raster data is one of the most important data source for GIS. GIS application and service relies daily more on raster data model. The traditional file system based raster data storage and management goes against the way of constructing subsequent GIS service and great capacity of geo-raster data management. Database system provides such data management, synchronized access and security, etc. with credible guarantee. Storing and management both graphic and attribute data in GIS by utilizing database system had already been a hotspot of research and application. The vector data model had been supported by standard and implemented in spatial database. However, the raster data model for spatial database storage still needs a further research and specification. The exiting spatial database based geo-raster management schema is mostly defined by a raster data engine extended at the client of a relation database. This solved the issue of raster data storage, but still disbennifit for building data based GIS service.Upon the above raster data storage and management issue, a geo-raster data engine with the components of geo-raster data structure, storage model and the operations on them, which can be loaded into the server side process of spatial database and manipulated through GeoSQL, is defined to provide a geo-raster data organization model. It is absolutely based on spatial database and graphic-attribute data integrated. Thus, makes the geo-raster data service effective, agility and low cost. Besides, a prototype of this model called PostRaster Engine is implemented upon Linux operation system and PostgreSQL database management system, which are pure opensource, in order to verify the feasibility and result of such design.