[GRASS-dev] STVDS where only attributes change over time?

[Blumentrath, Stefan]

Hi devs,

The TGRASS concept is a great enhancement to GRASS which already proved it`s usefulness for my daily work with raster data in many cases. Now I am discovering the vector part of it. If I understand correctly, the concept for vector data is identically to the raster part, namely using whole, time stamped vector datasets.

In long term monitoring, where time series play a central role, one often has a fixed location and only attributes are updated (as it is the case in e.g. detailed vegetation studies, temperature logger, wildlife camera traps...). In such cases having geometries for each registration of data would lead to significant redundancy of data and unnecessary computation (building topology, spatially matching each map...).

My question is now, how much work would it cause to introduce a new type of space time dataset with fixed geometries and a linked attribute table which contains the temporal information along with (variable) attribute values ("Space Time Vector Attribute Datasets")?

What would have to be changed?

Is it more appropriate to stick to database solutions (e.g. PostGIS) or R (or a combination of the two) and eventually fetch data from STRDS?

Kind regards,
Stefan
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