Applications of Computational Geometry in Geographic Information Systems(GIS)

 


Before we discuss the Applications of Computational Geometry in GIS we first need to know what GIS is,don't we?So GIS basically stores information like shape of country,the rainfall a given region receives,heights of mountains in the region,population count,cities etc.With GIS we can extract information about the given region of interest.For example,a seismologist may analyze the region to determine whether the region is prone to earthquake activities.Since GIS mainly deals with planar surfaces and manmade structures like buildings,several geometric problems arise.Since the geographic dataset is so large,we have to come with effective and faster algorithms to solve problems.

GIS works well with combination of  data.Lets say we have a map of region which consists of a 'network' of rivers,cities,railroads.What GIS does is it splits the map into 'layers' such that each layer contains only one type of information.In the above context,we will have separate layers consisting of network of roads,rails and cities.If we want to go from one city to other we can easily obtain our destination from the cities layer.Now in order to find the route between these two cities what GIS does is,it  creates an overlay of the city map and the road map and from it we can easily figure out the road to reach our destination.Guess what! In computational geometry the above is a fundamental problem called as'Line Segment Intersection'.In the problem above we just had to find the intersection between line segments forming the two networks of cities and roads and voila! the problem is solved.

Here is another interesting example.We all use maps daily,don't we?So when we are given coordinates of a given location,we just plug them into the interactive map and the map magically!(no magic there all maths and clever algorithms) figures out the region of point.This is nothing but the application of Geometric query problem called as 'Point location' which states that given a query point k determine the region of map containing the point k.

At last along with the two examples above, Computational Geometry algorithms have many more interesting applications in GIS.Thanks for reading!

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