Constructing a raster-based spatio-temporal hierarchical data model for marine fisheries application

Marine information has been increasing quickly.The traditional database technologies have disadvantages in manipulating large amounts of marine information which relates to the position in 3-D with the time.Recently,greater emphasis has been placed on GIS (geographical information system)to deal with the marine information.The GIS has shown great success for terrestrial applications in the last decades,but its use in marine fields has been far more restricted.One of the main reasons is that most of the GIS systems or their data models are designed for land applications.They cannot do well with the nature of the marine environment and for the marine information.And this becomes a fundamental challenge to the traditional GIS and its data structure.This work designed a data model,the raster-based spatio-temporal hierarchical data model (RSHDM),for the marine information system,or for the knowledge discovery from spatio-temporal data,which bases itself on the nature of the marine data and overcomes the shortages of the current spatio-temporal models when they are used in the field.As an experiment,the marine fishery data warehouse (FDW) for marine fishery management was set up,which was based on the RSHDM.The experiment proved that the RSHDM can do well with the data and can extract easily the aggregations that the management needs at different levels