Water Resources Research Act Program

Details for Project ID 2009DC103B

Development of a Fast Optimization Technique Using Interactive Spatial Join for GIS Application in Water Resources

Institute: District of Columbia
Year Established: 2009 Start Date: 2009-03-01 End Date: 2010-02-28
Total Federal Funds: $11,842 Total Non-Federal Funds: $30,826

Principal Investigators: Seon Kim, Pradeep Behera, Byunggu Yu

Project Summary: Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are used for storage and retrieval of large spatial datasets. Each dataset is usually stored in a layer. For example, layers may be roads, rivers, land elevation, etc. Layers are related if they have the same geographic coordinates. Spatial joins between two or more data sets are one of the most common GIS queries for data analysis. An example might be finding all roads within 100 feet of rivers located at 100 feet altitude or less. One common raster data spatial join technique is map overlay [3]. Raster overlay is straightforward when the input rasters have the same cell boundaries. The resulting raster can be obtained cell by cell from the originals using the relevant operations on the cell values. However, since the size of GIS data (especially when multiple layers are overlaid) can be very large, full layer overlays could take a very long time to complete. Little research work has been done on map overlay optimization techniques. This necessitates a need for approximation techniques. Most of the work on relational database join approximations cannot be directly applied to spatial databases. The objective of this interdisciplinary (Computer Science and Information Technology and Civil Engineering) project is to devise a GIS tool support for interactive and real time spatial join especially for the water resource research. The benefits of the project include the following: (1) an interactive and faster rater data overlaying to enhance the performance of water resource research; (2) a more efficient use of real time data for continuous monitoring and decision making; (3) GIS tools for real-time analysis; and (4) training, education, and research.