Data environment construction for virtual geographic environment

Virtual geographic environment (VGE) aims to express the real-world naturally, and support the complex geographic analysis. The data environment, fundamental of VGE, is expected to support the data management, analysis, sharing and application requirements of the massive complex geographic spatio-temporal data. In this paper, we summarized the key problems in the construction of the data environment of VGE. The unified spatio-temporal data model and a new data structure were developed according to the geographic rules. The organization and compress storage mechanism of massive spatio-temporal data were also developed. With these foundations, case studies, which integrate the global, regional and city scale data to operate complex data modeling and analysis, are performed. The results showed that the construction of the integrated data environment of VGE can largely improve the efficiency of GIS analysis, which also provides a potential new tool to support the complex geographic analysis.