Hexagonal connectivity maps for Digital Earth

Abstract

Geospatial data are gathered through a variety of different methods. The integration and handling of such datasets within a Digital Earth framework are very important in many aspects of science and engineering. One means of addressing these tasks is to use a Discrete Global Grid System and map points of the Earth's surface to cells. An indexing mechanism is needed to access the data and handle data queries within these cells. In this paper, we present a general hierarchical indexing mechanism for hexagonal cells resulting from the refinement of triangular spherical polyhedra representing the Earth. In this work, we establish a 2D hexagonal coordinate system and diamond-based hierarchies for hexagonal cells that enables efficient determination of hierarchical relationships for various hexagonal refinements and demonstrate its usefulness in Digital Earth frameworks.