UC Santa Barbara Specialist Research Meetings—Papers and Reports Title International Conference on Discrete Global Grids Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4tm0d1jm Author National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis Publication Date 2000-03-01 eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California NCGIA International Conference on Discrete Global Grids Introduction This conference, organized by the U.S. National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA) brought researchers together from many different disciplines to share advances in the rapidly developing fields of discrete global grids, global coordinate systems, and global georeferencing, and their applications. Participants were asked to submit position papers along with their application. The conference was held in the Radisson Hotel on the Santa Barbara waterfront from March 26-28, 2000. This document contains: • The original conference announcement • The participant list • All submitted abstracts (and full position papers where applicable) • The conference agenda Original Announcement The ability to specify geographic location is fundamental to many areas of science and many human activities. In addition to latitude/longitude, horizontal/vertical datums and rectangular coordinate systems such as UTM, new approaches to tessellating planets -- often involving triangulations, some of which are hierarchical -- have been developed by researchers in a variety of domains to satisfy a range of scientific objectives. Papers describing some of these efforts have appeared, and conference sessions have been organized to discuss them, but no international conference has yet been convened to specifically address discrete global grids (DGG) either theoretically or from perspectives of applications they can serve. The meeting described in this Call for Papers is intended to fill this void, and all workers in DGG-related areas are strongly encouraged to participate. Many disciplines are interested in methods for gridding the curved surface of the Earth. They include: • Statistics: sampling schemes and statistical models over the Earth's surface; • Geographic information systems and science: georeferencing, data structures and indexing schemes for global data, global visualization, and Digital Earth; • Remote sensing: consistent schemes for global imagery; • Environmental modeling: finite difference and finite element schemes for solution of partial differential equations in global system modeling; • Digital libraries: methods to support search, assessment, and retrieval of global geospatial and georeferenced data from distributed servers. This conference will bring researchers together from many different disciplines to share advances in the rapidly developing fields of discrete global grids, global coordinate systems, and global georeferencing, and their applications. The program will include keynote presentations, contributed papers, demonstrations, and informal discussions. The conference will be held in the Radisson Hotel on the Santa Barbara waterfront. It will begin with a reception and keynote presentation on Sunday evening March 26, and continue through Tuesday March 28, 2000. It is being organized by the Santa Barbara site of the U.S. National Center for Geographic Santa Barbara, CA: March 26-28, 2000 1 NCGIA International Conference on Discrete Global Grids Information and Analysis, by a steering committee chaired by Michael Goodchild (UCSB), and including Noel Cressie (Ohio State), Geoffrey Dutton (Spatial Effects), Nick Faust (Georgia Tech), Ralph Kahn (JPL), Tony Olsen (EPA), Denis White (EPA), Hrvoje Lukatela (Geodyssey), and Jon Kimerling (Oregon State). Papers are invited that address any aspect of global grids. Suitable topics might include, but are not limited to: • Interoperability of and with global grids; compatibility issues for different grid schemes, and global grids as a medium of exchange for geospatial data. • Data quality issues; what kinds of positional error and distortions do different schemes have, what are the consequences, and for whom and why do they matter. • Application of discrete global grid systems in survey designs for environmental and natural resources. • Alternative discrete global grid systems based on platonic polyhedra. • Discrete global grids in atmospheric and ocean modeling. • Spatial analyses using hierarchical structures in discrete global grids. • Graphics and visualization based on discrete global grids. • Efficient addressing schemes for hierarchical discrete global grids. Participants David Ashkenas Ion Mateescu Informix Software Inc. Ctr. for Intl. Earth Science Information Network Columbia University Mary Jo Brodzik National Snow & Ice Data Center, CIRES Karen A. Mulcahy University of Colorado Dept of Geography East Carolina University Earl F. Burkholder Surveying Engineering Dept Val Noronha New Mexico State University Digital Geographic Research Corporation Mississauga, ON Keith C. Clarke CANADA Dept of Geography University of California, Santa Barbara Anthony R. Olsen Natl. Health & Env. Effects Research Lab John Cloud ORD Western Ecology Division Dept of Geography U.S. Environmental Protection Agency University of California, Santa Barbara Dragan Petrovic Peter H. Dana Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc. Independent consultant Robert G. Raskin Geoffrey H. Dutton Jet Propulsion Laboratory Spatial Effects California Institute of Technology/NASA Nickolas L. Faust Martin Reddy Electro-Optics, Environment & Materials Lab Artificial Intelligence Center Georgia Tech Research Institute SRI International Georgia Institute of Technology Santa Barbara, CA: March 26-28, 2000 2 NCGIA International Conference on Discrete Global Grids Michael W. Freeston Alexandria Digital Library University of California, Santa Barbara Marc Riedo GIS Laboratory/Dept of Rural Engineering Michael F. Goodchild Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Dept of Geography University of California, Santa Barbara John Russell Geodyssey Limited Matt J. Gregory Dept of Geosciences Kevin M. Sahr Oregon State University Dept of Computer Science University of Oregon Lee Hancock Go2 Systems, Inc. Hanan J. Samet Computer Science Dept Jordan T. Hastings University of Maryland Go2 Systems, Inc. Ashton Shortridge Linda L. Hill Dept of Geography Alexandria Digital Library University of California, Santa Barbara University of California, Santa Barbara Dennis R. Smith Ralph Kahn Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc. Jet Propulsion Laboratory California Institute of Technology/ NASA Daniel L. Specht Topographic Engineering Center A. Ross Kiester United States Army Forestry Sciences Laboratory U.S. Dept of Agriculture, Forest Service Waldo Tobler Dept of Geography A. Jon Kimerling University of California, Santa Barbara Dept of Geosciences Oregon State University Tom Van Sant Ken Knowles Richard A. White National Snow & Ice Data Center Earth System Science Center University of Colorado Pennsylvania State University Shohaku Ko Amy Yeh Center for Environmental Remote Sensing ZipRealty.com Chiba University, Japan May Yuan Yvan G. Leclerc Dept of Geography Artificial Intelligence Center University of Oklahoma SRI International Simon Zhang Hrvoje Lukatela University of California, Berkeley Geodyssey Limited Santa Barbara, CA: March 26-28, 2000 3 NCGIA International Conference on Discrete Global Grids Position Papers and Abstracts Augmenting SAND with a spherical data model By Houman Alborzi and Hanan Samet Computer Science Department University of Maryland College Park, MD SAND is a spatial database and information browser system developed at University of Maryland which supports 2D and 3D data models. In this abstract we describe our experience in adding a spherical data model to SAND which enables it to perform spatial queries on spherical data and to browse their results in an incremental manner. In particular, we focus on the issues that arise in adding a spherical data model to a database that has been built on the basis of the planar data model. Special emphasis is place on how the data structure were chosen for the task. We also describe the various geometrical primitives that were needed for modeling spherical data as well as the algorithms that were required in our implementation. As SAND is based on the quadtree representation, a natural method for adding spherical data to SAND was to find a spherical adaptation of the quadtree. We mapped the sphere into a quadtree representation by projecting the sphere onto a cube, and then constructed the quadtree on the faces of cube. Alternatively, it is also possible to map the sphere into a plane, and then simply use a planar quadtree. We discuss some of the differences between these approaches. We also describe the display models and visual query mechanisms used in spherical SAND to ease the task of navigating through the data. By adding a spherical sector primitive, we make it possible for users to locate data on the sphere which are around a great circle of the sphere. The same primitive allows users to query the database using a range of view from any point on the sphere. Santa Barbara, CA: March 26-28, 2000 4 NCGIA International Conference on Discrete Global Grids .. National Snow and Ice Data Center World Data Center for Glaciology EASE-Grid A Versatile Set of Introduction Equal-Area Defining a Gridded Data Set EASE-Grid Map Parameters Projections and Why Equal-Area Maps? Grids Why a Spherical Earth Model? EASE-Grid Family of Grid Definitions