Drowning in Geospatial Point Data: A Pattern Based Approach

Abstract

Collecting, storing and archiving data are well understood processes. However, it is not trivial do decide, in which form and how much of the data should be presented to the user. More is not always better. The purpose of this contribution is to present a new way to focus on the basic need for simple answers to simple queries. In this paper three query-patterns are described, which help to reduce the information flood and enhance the usability. The amounts of point data we talk about are rather large for geo-data processing, in particular they are very large in terms of human perception. It is found that the presented patterns can reduce the amount of data by several orders of magnitude by focusing on areas and species of particular interest.