UC Riverside

This thesis explores geospatial vector data, including geometric shapes such as points, lines, and polygons. This data is crucial in navigation, urban planning, and many more applications. Geospatial computing is a multidisciplinary field that focuses on creating techniques and tools to handle large geospatial datasets. Given the reliance on data lakes to store large data sets in their raw formats, it is critical to have full support for geospatial datasets to enable scalable processing. To address this, we make two contributions in this area. First, we propose a column-oriented binary format called Spatial Parquet, which integrates geospatial vector data into Apache Parquet that enables significant data compression and efficient querying. Second, to improve support for semi-structured data, we introduce a distributed JSON processor for scalable SQL queries on large JSON datasets, including GeoJSON. It processes complex datasets like Open Street Map with features such as projection and filter push-down. Advances in Deep Learning (DL), including foundation models and Large Language Models (LLMs), offer opportunities for geospatial data analysis. We make three main contributions in this area. First, we study how to design DL models that can express a wide range of geospatial functions. We explore three representations: an image-based representation using geo-referenced histograms (GeoImg), a graph-based point-set representation (GeoGraph), and a vector-based representation using a Fourier encoder (GeoVec). We formalize these representations and design corresponding models: ResNet and UNet for the first, PointNet++ for the second, and Poly2Vec with Transformers for the third. We evaluate all approaches on four spatial problems, showing the accuracy and effectiveness of the three approaches. Second, we create a benchmark called GS-QA for evaluating spatial question-answering with LLMs. A semi-automated process generates diverse question-answer pairs that cover various spatial objects, predicates, and complexities. An evaluation methodology is suggested with some experiments. Finally, a prototype for generating geospatial vector data from text prompts, called GeoGen I, is proposed. It has potential for applications such as spatial interpolation, data augmentation, and change analysis. We adapt diffusion models, traditionally used for generating realistic images, as geospatial data generators. We also explore their use for similarity search through geospatial data embeddings, highlighting the potential of vector databases in this domain. This thesis advances geospatial data processing, storage, analysis, and generation, opening new research pathways in geospatial computing.