Robert and Marios on the spatialindex list have also given me some great suggestions, especially Marios' about using bulk loading, which is relevant because LAS data are practically *never* updated.

http://lists.gispython.org/pipermail/spatialindex/2009-April/000058.html
http://lists.gispython.org/pipermail/spatialindex/2009-April/000059.html

On Apr 21, 2009, at 3:41 PM, Etienne Bellemare Racine wrote:

My experience with this is extracting lidar subsets with Liblas. And I thought that if it was possible to just sort the file by coordinate (i.e. rewriting it ordered) it would enable to only scan a part of the file. Maybe ordering the file would take some time (probably a lot, do you have an idea ?), but if you are using it frequently for an extraction, it could worth it, I don't really know what are the gains.


On Apr 22, 2009, at 5:18 AM, Hamish wrote:

also anything that introduces memory or processing time overheads must
be built in a way that will scale to much larger datasets than we have
today (but might in 5 years time, when hopefully this fine library is
still in active use)



Yes, reordering isn't practical, but the biggest problem is that it changes the original data. My scenario is the data warehousing scenario. Imagine LAS files at 1m density covering the continental US. Data accounting is very important in that scenario, and while libLAS isn't the database in that scenario, it can play a strong role as an intermediary. Intermediaries shouldn't change data.

On Apr 22, 2009, at 4:45 AM, Volker Wichmann wrote:

I've no experience with either spatialindex nor GML LidarK, but maybe you can find some hints on

http://research.graphicon.ru/3d-point-data-processing/gml-lidark-library-6.html

There's some discussion on pro/cons of various indexing approaches.

An excellent lead, thanks. Do you happen to know if it is compatible with libLAS' license?

On Apr 22, 2009, at 7:49 AM, Etienne Bellemare wrote:

Is speed improvement the only virtue of spatial indexing, or am I wrong ?

Spatial window querying speed is the strongest virtue, but there are a few others. LAS is essentially just an archive format right now, with most softwares writing their own format to work with the data internally. libLAS' ability to do fast window queries with an index would give developers another reason to stick with LAS rather than rolling their own -- lessening the chance of dropping data and increasing libLAS' uptake.

Another reason is mass parallelization. Imagine a cluster of Amazon EC2 instances processing the indexes of 1000s of LAS files and then an operation that trolls through the indexes and merges them all together. _______________________________________________
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