November 3, 2006 - Hanan Samet

Title
Sorting in Space

Abstract
The representation of spatial data is an important issue in computer graphics, computer vision, geographic information systems, and robotics. A wide number of representations are currently in use. Recently there has been renewed interest in hierarchical data structures such as quadtrees, octrees, R-trees, and etc. The key advantage of these representations is that they provide a way to index into space. In fact, they are little more than multidimensional sorts. They are compact and depending on the nature of the spatial data they save space as well as time and also facilitate operations such as search. In this talk we give a brief overview of hierarchical spatial data structures and related research results. In addition we demonstrate the SAND Browser (http://www.cs.umd.edu/~brabec/sandjava) and the VASCO JAVA applet (http://www.cs.umd.edu/~hjs/quadtree) which illustrate these methods.