Oracle Spatial 11g's Enhancements by Joe Francica March 15, 2007
Here is an overview of the enhancements found in Oracle
Spatial 11g
3D Data Type Support
One of the key features introduced in Oracle Spatial 11g is support for
three dimensional data types. Siva Ravada, director of software
development, introduced the specific elements of 3D data support, in
addition to other enhancements in Oracle 11g, which is due for release
sometime before the end of this calendar year.
Ravada emphasized that Oracle targeted its software development in
supporting 3-dimensional data toward specific applications such as:
GIS for city planning and property rights
City modeling and adopting features to support
CityGML guidelines
Business Intelligence for real estate and
advertising
Virtual Reality solutions
Specifically, the 3D data types that will be supported
include points, lines, polygons and solids, as well as multi-points,
multi-lines and multi-surfaces. It will follow Geography Markup
Language (GML) 3.1.1 and ISO19107 specifications. Support for simple
solids includes closed surfaces such as a cube or pyramid. There will
not be 3D support for arcs or parametric surfaces. These enhancements
will support large, high density and volume 3D city models. Additional
new data types support the massive volumes of point data, such as point
clouds, obtained from laser scanners and LiDAR, as well as triangulated
irregular networks (TIN). Oracle has introduced a new datatype,
SDO_Point_Cloud, to efficiently manage LiDAR data. Surface models, such
as a TIN model, can be generated from these point clouds and stored in
the new SDO_TIN datatype. Specific functionality includes:
Operations on 3D R-trees include:
SQL operator support
SDO_Filter, SDO_Anyinteract,
SDO_Within_Distance, SDO_NN (nearest neighbor) only
PL/SQL functions
Validate_geometry
Validate_layer
SDO_Distance
SDO_Geom.Anyinteract
SDO_area, SDO_volume
SDO_CS.Transform (coordinate system
transformation in 3D)
J3D_Geometry: Java Interface
Extends the 2D JGeometry Class for 3D
Support for TIN
A TIN is a vector-based topological data model used to represent
terrain surfaces. TINs are composed of a network of irregularly spaced
triangles. The 3D surface is derived from these irregularly spaced
points where each point has an x, y and z value. Oracle's data type,
SDO_TIN, can block the data into small pieces. Oracle doesn't worry
about the number of points; it has the mechanism to aggregate the TINs.
This function reads the TIN block as an SDO_Geometry and is much more
efficient to store and retrieve data. Oracle 11g will not support
functions to derive slope and aspect in this release.
3D coordinate system support
Oracle 11g will associate a coordinate system with 3D data. The 3D
coordinate systems are all based on European Petroleum Survey Group
(EPSG) specifications (codes representing geodetic parameters for
datums and projections), and the following are supported:
Vertical coordinate systems
Geocentric: 3-D Cartesian
Geographic-3D: 3-d ellipsoidal
Geographic-3D: 3-d ellipsoidal
Compound coordinate System
Web Services
Spatial Web Services
Oracle identifies two approaches for structuring spatial Web services.
The first model to consider when setting up a Web service is one in
which "spatial" is the primary focus of the Web service. For example, a
basic Web service might entail the ability to incorporate real-time
information and the result may be a map or a report, such as returning
driving directions between two points. The second model is one for a
business service that contains a spatial component such as performing a
standard business search, query or workflow. The spatial information is
not the primary focus but the result may incorporate a map as a
supporting element to visualize the information.
Oracle Spatial already supports the Open Geospatial Consortium's Web
Map Service (WMS 1.1). Oracle 11g will support the Web Feature Service
(WFS) version 1.1 and Catalog Services Web (CSW 2.0) specifications.
Oracle Spatial's WFS implementation uses SOAP/XML over HTTP, as well as
the GML filter specification for feature search and Lightweight
Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) for authentication. For transactional
operations, the product supports the ability to retrieve a set of
features while locking some, or all, features for a certain period of
time. It also supports updating or deleting existing feature instances
based on filter criteria.
Web Services Security
One of the more important features of Oracle is the ability to address
stringent security issues and specific levels of security. Those not
familiar with the levels of security will find the following
explanation useful.
Identification - Who are you?
Authentication - How do I know it is you?
Authorization - Are you allowed?
Integrity - Is the data tampered?
Confidentiality - Did anyone else read it?
Auditing - Can you show what happened?
Non-repudiation - Can you prove it happened?
Raster Data and the GeoRaster function
Enhancements to Oracle Spatial's support for raster data include:
Supports multiple NODATA values and multiple
NODATA value Ranges for any GeoRaster objects and their individual
bands/layers
Supports empty raster blocks
Union/merging of multiple GeoRaster objects or
multiple layers
Partial update/edit of raster data inside a
GeoRaster object
GeoRaster template functions to ease third-party
software integration so that the developers don't need to directly deal
with database binary large object (BLOB) and XML Type
Statistical analysis functions
Support for sub-cell and sub-pixel addressing
(floating row and column numbers) in the GeoRaster cell space
Supports irregular raster blocking
Loading and exporting additional formats
GeoTIFF
JPEG 2000
DigitalGlobe RPC text
Network Data Model
Oracle has made several enhancements to its network data model (NMD)
that some users have been awaiting. The NDM has two components: the NMD
Load-on-Demand (LOD) Network Partitions that supports dynamic data
sets, and the NDM LOD Analysis Engine with a Java API that supports a
suite of functions including:
Shortest path
Nearest neighbors
Within cost
Reachable and reaching nodes
Hierarchical shortest path
Other NDM enhancements include the following modeling
and analysis features:
User defined data
Duration modeling
Sub-network support using SQL-like filters to
speed up network loading and analysis
Path arithmetic support including path addition,
subtraction, intersection and comparison based on connectivity
Partial link support on paths (sub-path) and
trace out
Workspace manager support
Routing engine improvements include:
Driving directions in different languages
Generation of turn-specific geometries
Route as a set of edges
Works with NAVTEQ and Tele Atlas data
In summary, while many functions are planned in this
release, there are no announcements or decisions about whether some
functionality will be moved into Locator (which is part of basic
Oracle) from Spatial (which is an extra charge add-on). Users are
encouraged to lobby Oracle through the User Group regarding this issue.
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