Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: The Doubly Connected Edge List (DCEL) is an edge-list structure widely used in spatial applications, primarily for planar topological and geometric computations. However, it is also applicable to various types of data, including 3D models and geographic data. An essential operation is the overlay operation, which combines the DCELs of two input polygon layers and can easily support spatial queries on polygons like the intersection, union, and difference between these layers. However, existing techniques for spatial overlay operations suffer from two main limitations. First, they fail to handle many large datasets practically used in real applications. Second, they cannot handle arbitrary spatial lines that practically form polygons, e.g., city blocks, but they are given as a set of scattered lines. This work proposes a distributed and scalable way to compute the overlay operation and its related supported queries. Our operations also support arbitrary spatial lines through a scalable polygonization process. We address the issues of efficiently distributing the lines and overlay operators and offer various optimizations that improve performance. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed scalable solution can efficiently compute the overlay of large real datasets.
Source: GeoInformatica
Language: English
Subfield: Signal Processing
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $2,590
Funders: National Science Foundation, Google
Awards: Collaborative Research: Encoding Geography - Scaling up an RPP to achieve inclusive geocomputational education, CAREER: Scalable Spatial Data Science on User-generated Data, RIDIR: Scalable Geospatial Analytics for Social Science Research, III: Medium: Efficient Collaborative Perception over Controllable Agent Networks
OpenAlex ID: W4409709020