Developing Map Databases: Problems and Solutions - Maps for the Future Children Education and Internet - page 148

Fig. 12.8 Viewing the selected map on a local client computer
12.6 Conclusions
The latest EDIT system is version 3.0, and it has been more or less continuously
developed. More and more research institutes and universities outside Budapest use
it. Several interested students of informatics and cartography choose the problem of
developing large map databases as their research topic.
This is an extremely rich topic, although the problems seem to be simple.
Namely, we have the digital maps completed with descriptive data. Organizing
them into a relation database is not a difficult task. The size of the raster maps can
be very large (between 25 and 500 MBytes), while the vector maps have very varied
structures. The size of a hyperspectral image can be extremely large (even 4-4.5
GBytes). As a result, the total size of the images for a certain area may exceed 1
TByte (1,000 GByte). Handling such a large amount of data is not easy at all, not to
mention displaying them. Displaying the images of several megabyte size on the
Internet is particularly problematic, and moving these images on the web is really
difficult. It is necessary to develop special programs (services) on the server side
that generate such images the size of which do not exceed the size offered by the
resolution capacity of the given video card. This is the way to eliminate the barriers
caused by the differences in the bandwidth.
The development must consider some other aspects that are not included in the
present 3.0 version. One of these aspects is the transfer to or at least the study of
transferring to object-oriented database management (e.g., the use of MongoDB) in