Instant data retrieval from large point clouds
The Dutch government offers the AHN [1] as a
way to get information about the height of any specific place in the country.
They offer this data by using a point cloud. That is, a large set of points
with some additional meta information. With the current version of the AHN the
resolution of the dataset is about eight points per square meter. This results
in about 2.5TB of compressed data for the relatively small area of the
Netherlands. While this is something that is not impossible to store locally,
it does offer some challenges.
