Raster Databases

Abstract

Spatio-temporal data play an important role in science, both as observed natural phenomena like temperature curves or satellite imagery and as artificially generated data such as simulation results or statistical data derived from spatio-temporal phenomena. As a coarse but common classification, spatio-temporal data can be grouped into discretized and conceptually continuous data (Figure 1). The first category allows points, lines, areas, and bodies to have any coordinate value, while the latter category has all data values sitting at the crosspoints of equidistant grids. When dealing with maps, these categories are called vector and raster data, respectively, while in Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), for example, the terms general mesh and regular mesh are in use.