Spatio-Temporal Integrated Analysis With Mapal

The integrated management of entities and coverages is still an issue for current technologies in the area of GIS. Current tools provide interfaces with many operations for vector and raster analysis, which are not easy to combine. Defining new operations always requires programming. General purpose DBMSs are extended with geometric primitives for entity management, whereas coverage data analysis is better supported by array data managers. Big data technologies are emerging also in this area mainly for the management of very large multidimensional arrays. The present paper describes a new data model and relevant language that enables integrated spatio-temporal analysis over both entity data and temporal and spatial coverage data at various temporal and spatial resolutions. An implementation is currently being undertaken that tries to take advantage of parallelization on currently available multi-core hardware architectures. Further work includes the migration to multinode share nothing architectures.