I recently spoke to Fred Limp, the past director of the Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies and a gifted geospatial educator and practitioner at the University of Arkansas. I’ve always been fascinated by the types of projects that Fred works on, and I conducted an interview to delve into the evolution that’s taking place in the 3D space.
Fred and his team have been working on LIDAR applications and digital city modeling among other cutting-edge applications. An area that Fred is tackling is the analysis of 3D data at multiple scales, which offers some unique challenges:
“What happens when scale changes is not just a simple case of there’s more and bigger data sets.One of the real challenges that I see to the whole geospatial community is that when you “zoom in,” you do a whole lot more than just zoom in. You have to change paradigms of analysis and sometimes the data structure. One of the things that I find particularly exciting that is helping us begin to think about this is that the work being done on CityGML and the use of the concept of levels of detail.
Our community has a bunch of verticals, there’s the remote sensing vertical, and the LIDAR vertical, and the terrestrial laser scanning vertical. But we also have all these horizontal applications that we have to decide what tools and what methods and what analysis to do at different scales. The level of detail concept in CityGML begins to give us a paradigm for moving seamlessly from scales of 1 to 50 or 1 to 100,000. We need to develop analysis and display systems where we know how to begin thinking about that.
I think that’s a really important idea and I don’t know if people have really addressed it. It’s about how you think about data as you move between different scales, and what analytical operations makes sense. To me, that whole scale issue is something that we really have to think about a lot because so much changes as you move through different scales.”
Read the full interview online here.
