56 Big Data: Techniques and Technologies in Geoinformatics
planners are related with spatial or location information (Worral, 1991). During
the past three decades, communities around the world have regularly accumu-
lated large collections (multi-petabytes) of 2D and 3D spatial data. Massive 2D
spatial data archive examples include repositories of aerial and satellite imagery.
For example, the US Geological Survey (USGS) recently announced a 37-year
record of global Landsat satellite images (petabytes of data) that have continu-
ously recorded conditions on the Earth’s surface. This image resource is now
available for free to the public (USGS, 2011). NASA generates roughly 5 TB of
remote sensing-related data per day (Vatsavai et al., 2012). In ...