SBIR-STTR Award

The development of a conceptual design that demonstrates the feasibility for creating, storing, and exploiting 3-D topology in a commercial geographic information system will establish a new standard for the industry. Founding the design on the ISO 19107 Spatial schema standard, issued in 2003, and the Open GIS Consortium’s Web Services standards will solidify the development and enable federal and civil organizations to procure standards based architecture. More importantly, the instantiation of a 3D Topology standard in commercial DBMS will provide the enabling tools for software based automated data maintenance in a real 3D world.

Benefits:
The benefits of readily accessible, user-friendly GIS products that both display and provide analysis of the 3D environment extends beyond the military warfare needs to other governmental functions at the federal, state, and local level, particularly in the areas of security, fire, rescue, and law enforcement. In the commercial arena, these products would enable companies with significant infrastructure to more effectively manage their assets. Since Laser-Scan’s proposed approach would enable the application of 3D technology in either stand-alone products or in conjunction with existing database products, the ability of the industry to quickly identify new applications is enhanced.

Keywords:
3D, Topology, Modeling, Implementation

While highly accurate 3D geospatial data is increasingly available, today's commercial geospatial information products do not fully exploit the power of 3D topology to utilize this data in automated decision support systems planned in the Combat Terrain Information Systems (CTIS) program. In the Phase I Army SBIR project just completed, Laser-Scan leveraged its previous experience developing the proprietary Radius Topology, the first implementation of a 2D topology engine in a commercially available relational database management system (RDBMS) and demonstrated the feasibility of a conceptual design for creating, storing, and exploiting 3D topology for geospatial features. All Phase I goals were met or exceeded, setting the stage for follow-on Phase II work that will allow us to research, develop, and integrate extensions to the RDBMS so that a fully three-dimensional GIS will be possible for the first time. These extensions will include the first ISO TC211 19107-compliant implementation, an efficient 3D surface representation, and a 3D spatial querying capability to exploit a 3D spatial index. These advances will allow Army terrain analysts to support mission planning and military operations by performing queries for adjacency, containment, and routing with a level of efficiency not previously possible.

Keywords:
3d Topology, 3d Visualization, 3d Analysis, 3d Dbms, Spatial Data, Iso Tc211 19107, Gis, Geography Markup Language