A Computationally Efficient Technique for the Improvement of the Display of Geospatial Information Stored in Geographic Coordinates

Abstract

Geographical Information Systems (GIS) frequently store positional information in geographic coordinates (i.e., degrees of latitude and longitude). As a result, when GIS data are displayed on a video terminal, it is a usual practice to display the information "un-projected" with the view window x and y axis scaled in decimal degrees with degrees of longitude and latitude having the same scale factor on each axis. While this practice results in fast display time, avoiding the computational load imposed by complex cartographic projections, it results in a display that distorts the spatial relationships of the elements displayed on screen unless the displayed area is near the equator. A simple method is proposed as an alternative that greatly improves the display "fidelity" without adding any significant additional computational load. (6 figures, 3 refs.)

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jul 11, 2003
Accession Number
ADA416769

Entities

People

  • Frank P. Mccreedy
  • Hillary C. Mesick
  • Michael M. Harris

Organizations

  • United States Naval Research Laboratory

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Air Platforms

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Aspect Ratio
  • Distortion
  • Earth Sciences
  • Ellipsoids
  • Geodesy
  • Geodetic Surveys
  • Geographic Information Systems
  • Grids
  • Information Systems
  • Latitude
  • Longitude
  • Military Research
  • Reliability
  • World Geodetic System

Readers

  • Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)
  • Geodesy
  • Geospatial Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence Analytics