[GRASS5] New raster formats

[Trevor Wiens]

I've noted that there has been talk of a new raster format for future versions of GRASS. What kind of changes are being considered? One thing I miss from SPANS was the quadtree format which allowed for very quick processing of data without loss of spatial resolution. I realize that implementing this in GRASS would mean rewrites to much of the existing code to deal with the complexities of the format but I thought it would be worth throwing out the idea for consideration, as it seems that we constantly face bigger and bigger data sets as computing power grows. Since PCI's takeover of SPANS, they've dropped this and there is no commercial vendor willing to put in the effort to gain the benefits from the use of this format (speed and disk space). I'm curious if this has been considered.

T
-- 
Trevor Wiens 
twiens at interbaun.com

The significant problems that we face cannot be solved at the same 
level of thinking we were at when we created them. 
(Albert Einstein)