A COM-based framework for management, analysis and visualization of large scope digital elevation models

This paper presents a component object model (COM) based framework for managing, analyzing and visualizing massive multi-scale digital elevation models (DEMs). The framework consists of a data management component (DMC), which is based on RDBMS/ORDBMS, a data analysis component (DAC) and a data render component (DRC). DMC can manage massive multi-scale data expressed at various reference frames within a pyramid database and can support fast access to data at variable resolution. DAC integrates many use-ful applied analytic functions whose results can be overlaid with the 3D scene rendered by DRC, DRC provides view-dependent data paging with the support of the underlying DMC and organizes the potential visible data at different levels into rendering.