Descrete or Continious, Raster or Vector - what is the best way to describe geographic phenomena.
What’s the Difference?
Basically vector data is composed with primitives like points or nodes, lines or arcs (how did ESRI come to the meaningful name ArcGIS?) and polygons. There is a hierarchical approch to combinde these primitives together: lines (polylines) are defined by a series of points and polygons are an enclused series of arcs. Raster on the other hand is an image represeted with pixels. Each pixel has a value which can be represented as a color.
In the geographic content this two approaches can look like this. Some GIS analysis techniques works well on vector data other are can be done easily on raster data.
Some Pros and Cons
Here is a quick list of the ups and downs for both vector and raster.
| Vector | Raster |
| + Actionable (enables specific user-interaction) + Spatially query-able + Attribute query-able + Unlimited scalability |
+ Faster for more-detailed data + Rich visuals + Typically, a more readily available public data source |
| - Unwieldy file size for geographically complex data - Typically requires increased GIS know-how to fully leverage - Less suited for rich visuals |
- Flattened - Relatively dead query-wise - Limited scalability (pixelation) |
Well?
The question: “Which is better, vector or raster?”
“The answer is yes. Put your money on the folks who take a hybrid approach.”
Written and submitted from Home, using my 802.11g WiFi network.
0 Responses to “Vector vs. Raster - What is better?”
Leave a Reply