AtlasHDF: an efficient big data framework for GeoAI

The last decade witnesses a fast development in geospatial application of artificial intelligence (GeoAI). However, due to the misalignment with wider computer science progresses, the geospatial community, for a long time, keeps working with powerful and over-sophisticated tools and software, whose functionality goes far beyond the actual basic need of GeoAI tasks. This fact, to a certain extent, hinders our steps towards establishing future sustainable and replicable GeoAI models. In this paper, we aim to address this challenge by introducing an efficient big data framework based on the modern HDF5 technology, called AtlasHDF, in which we designed lossless data mappings (immediate mapping and analysis-ready mapping) from OpenStreetMap (OSM) vector data into a single HDF5 data container to facilitate fast and flexible GeoAI applications learnt from OSM data. Since the HDF5 is included as a default dependency in most GeoAI and high performance computing (HPC) environments, the proposed AtlasHDF provides a cross-platformm and single-techonology solution of handling heterogeneous big geodata for GeoAI. As a case study, we conducted a comparative analysis of the AtlasHDF framework with three commonly-used data formats (i.e., PBF, Shapefile and GeoPackage) using the latest OSM data from the city of Berlin (Germany), then elaborated on the advantages of each data format w.r.t file size, querying, rending, dependency, data extendability. Given a wide range of GeoAI tasks that can potentially benefit from our framework, our future work will focus on extending the framework to heterogeneous big geodata (vector and raster) to support seamless and fast data integration without any geospatial software dependency until the training stage of GeoAI. A reference implementation of the framework developed in this paper is provided to the public at: https://github.com/tumbgd/hdf4water.