A unified representation method for interdisciplinary spatial earth data

ABSTRACT Unified representation of spatial earth data is an essential scientific issue. The analysis and mining of interdisciplinary spatial earth data resources can help discover hidden scientific knowledge, and even reveal the intrinsic relationship among different disciplines. However, the different description methods and inner structures among interdisciplinary spatial earth data bring significant challenges to unified data management and collaborative analysis in earth environment research. To address this issue, this paper proposes a unified representation method for interdisciplinary spatial earth data. First, this paper establishes a general metadata model and realizes the unified description of interdisciplinary data. Second, an entity data organization model is presented, which can realize the unified organization of entity data with different inner structures. Finally, we introduce the Spatial Earth Data Format (SEDF), a data format based on HDF5 for implementing the data organization model of interdisciplinary spatial earth data. Data representation experiments and validation are conducted to verify the availability and practicability of the proposed data representation method. The results suggest the powerful ability to represent spatial earth data efficiently and ensure data integrity, which is convenient for data management and application.