Interesting.  I came across this paper detailing the design of
opentopography.org's lidar system, and they indicate they are doing
something akin to load the LAS data in, and then running a spatial
index (I'm too early in this game to know the difference between what
they are describing and how the GIST index works):
http://www.springerlink.com/content/x5q937840983un76/fulltext.pdf

Once I build an index for this 3-d data, setting aside the file size
issues, should the spatial querying be relatively efficient?  If so,
how would I go about doing a cross-tile query?

Howard, I am interested in checking out your tools but I don't have
access to Oracle, just open source databases.  Can I use postgresql to
utilize your algorithms?

Thanks!

--j

On Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 12:39 PM, Shaun Langley <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi Howard,
>
> I think this is an excellent question!  I'm actually in the process of 
> developing a manuscript that outlines the different methods for storage and 
> querying of spatial data such as LIDAR.  In my situation, I'm leaning towards 
> using triggers to create dynamic views that would allow me to simultaneously 
> query all tables of a given type.  I intent to explore a variety of different 
> storage types though... I would love to hear about what you decide to do!  
> Keep in touch!
>
> Cheers,
> Shaun
>
> On Jun 24, 2011, at 2:46 PM, Jonathan Greenberg wrote:
>
>> Folks:
>>
>> This topic I believe has been brought up before, but I thought I'd
>> send an email since I'm a bit of a noob with POSTGIS.  We have a large
>> collection of Lidar points that I would like to perform spatial
>> querying on (e.g. give me all points within a certain bounding box).
>> The data (currently in LAS format, but easily loadable into the DB),
>> is tiled up into smaller subsets.  The data is x,y,z,intensity (and
>> some other attributes that aren't so important)  I have a few
>> questions:
>>
>> 1) Should I load ALL of the LAS files into one massive table for
>> querying (this is going to be a LOT of points).
>> 2) If not, is there a trick where if I load up each LAS file into a
>> separate table (which would, in theory be preferable since I'd like to
>> do some testing before dealing with a database of this size), but
>> somehow when I do a spatial query, the query can span multiple tables
>> (e.g. say the query box is at the intersection of two adjacent tiles)?
>>
>> Related: what is the most efficient way to do a spatial query that
>> effectively "rasterizes" this data, e.g. the min z value between x1
>> and x2, and y1 and y2, where x2-x1 and y2-y1 are the x and y pixel
>> sizes?  I'm not talking about interpolation, I'm talking an exact
>> query.
>>
>> Thanks!
>>
>> --j
>>
>> --
>> Jonathan A. Greenberg, PhD
>> Assistant Project Scientist
>> Center for Spatial Technologies and Remote Sensing (CSTARS)
>> Department of Land, Air and Water Resources
>> University of California, Davis
>> One Shields Avenue
>> Davis, CA 95616
>> Phone: 415-763-5476
>> AIM: jgrn307, MSN: [email protected], Gchat: jgrn307
>> _______________________________________________
>> postgis-users mailing list
>> [email protected]
>> http://postgis.refractions.net/mailman/listinfo/postgis-users
>
> --------------------------
> Shaun Langley
> Graduate Student, PhD
> Department of Geography
> Michigan State University
> Home: (517) 974-9346
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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>
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