Industry Terminology: GIS Format
Historically, "coverage" is the term typically applied to the legacy Arc/INFO format developed by ESRI. The Coverage model at that time was a revolutionary concept, extending CAD formats into more spatially aware data that featured linked attributes. Coverages processed using the BUILD and CLEAN commands are 2D planar datasets that maintain topological information, thus a polygon "knows" which segments of its perimeter it shares with adjacent polygons. Due to the lack of processing power in computing at the time of its development, the Coverage model employs indexed binary files to store spatial and attribute data separately as opposed to utilizing a RDBMS.
This has changed with the advent of raster database technology like rasdaman which makes efficient ad-hoc filtering and processing feasible.
Read more about this topic: Coverage Data
Famous quotes containing the word industry:
“The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you.”
—John Updike (b. 1932)