Planetary mapping—The datamodelʹs perspective and GIS framework

Demands for a broad range of integrated geospatial data-analysis tools and methods for planetary data organization have been growing considerably since the late 1990s when a plethora of missions equipped with new instruments entered planetary orbits or landed on the surface. They sent back terabytes of new data which soon became accessible for the scientific community and public and which needed to be organized. On the terrestrial side, issues of data access, organization and utilization for scientific and economic analyses are handled by using a range of well-established geographic information systems (GIS) that also found their way into the field of planetary sciences in the late 1990s. We here address key issues concerning the field of planetary mapping by making use of established GIS environments and discuss methods of addressing data organization and mapping requirements by using an easily integrable datamodel that is—for the time being—designed as file-geodatabase (FileGDB) environment in ESRIʹs ArcGIS. A major design-driving requirement for this datamodel is its extensibility and scalability for growing scientific as well as technical needs, e.g., the utilization of such a datamodel for surface mapping of different planetary objects as defined by their respective reference system and by using different instrument data. Furthermore, it is a major goal to construct a generic model which allows to perform combined geologic as well as geomorphologic mapping tasks making use of international standards without loss of information and by maintaining topologic integrity. An integration of such a datamodel within a geospatial DBMS context can practically be performed by individuals as well as groups without having to deal with the details of administrative tasks and data ingestion issues. Besides the actual mapping, key components of such a mapping datamodel deal with the organization and search for image-sensor data and previous mapping efforts, as well as the proper organization of cartographic representations and assignments of geologic/geomorphologic units within their stratigraphic context.