Methods to achieve accurate projection of regional and global raster databases

This research aims at building a decision support system (DSS) for selecting an optimum projection considering various factors, such as pixel size, areal extent, number of categories, spatial pattern of categories, resampling methods, and error correction methods. Specifically, this research will investigate three goals theoretically and empirically and, using the already developed empirical base of knowledge with these results, develop an expert system for map projection of raster data for regional and global database modeling. The three theoretical goals are as follows:

(1) The development of a dynamic projection that adjusts projection formulas for latitude on the basis of raster cell size to maintain equal-sized cells.

(2) The investigation of the relationships between the raster representation and the distortion of features, number of categories, and spatial pattern.

(3) The development of an error correction and resampling procedure that is based on error analysis of raster projection.