scidb4geo

A SciDB plugin for managing spacetime earth-observation arrays.

Description

scidb4geo is a plugin for managing spatial and temporal reference information of SciDB arrays. It defines a couple of additional operators and adds actual reference information to SciDB's system catalog. It can be used within AFL or AQL.

Getting Started

The following sequence of SciDB queries demonstrate how the plugin can be used to store spatiotemporal reference of arrays. These are the most basic operations though there are more complex operators that will be demonstrated in a case study in the near future.

1. Create a random spatiotemporal array covering the whole world

set no fetch; # do not print results of store
store(build(<val:double>[lat=0:179,256,0,lon=0:359,256,0,t=0:364,32,0],double(random(),world); 
eo_setsrs(world,'lon','lat','EPSG',4326,'x0=-180 y0=90 a11=1 a22=-1');
eo_settrs(world,'t','2001-01-01', 'P1D');
set fetch; # we do want to see output of the following queries.

2. Get spatial / temporal reference information

eo_getsrs(world); 
eo_gettrs(world);
eo_extent(world);

rename(world,earth); # renaming does not change spatial reference

eo_getsrs(earth); 
eo_gettrs(earth);
eo_extent(earth);

3. Clean up

remove(earth);

Operators

The table below lists novel AFL operators. Detailed descriptions of arguments, return values, and examples can be found in the gh-pages branch at http://appelmar.github.io/scidb4geo/operators.

Build and Installation

The following instructions refer to using SciDB version 15.7 on Ubuntu 14.04. You will need the SciDB development packages which you normally have automatically installed if you built SciDB from sources. Furthermore, the plugin requires libcurl.

1. Clone this repository git clone https://github.com/appelmar/scidb4geo.
2. Compile by running make in the base directory. If SciDB libraries and headers are installed at a nonstandard location, you may use make SCIDB=/path/to/scidb.
3. Use the install/setup.sh script to extend SciDB's system catalog by running cd install && chmod +x setup.sh && ./setup.sh as the root user or with sudo rights.
4. Copy libscidb4geo.so to the plugins directory of SciDB on all instances, i.e. cp libscidb4geo.so /opt/scidb/15.7/lib/scidb/plugins/ for a default local SciDB installation.
5. Now, you should be able to load the plugin using AFL% load_library('scidb4geo');