Although there are relatively few major data sources for LCA, the data themselves are presented with highly heterogeneous formats, interfaces, and distribution mechanisms.
Two geodatabases, namely Integrated Geodatabase IGG) and Regularized 2.5D Geodatabase (R2.5DG), were created to store and integrate digital data sets in heterogeneous formats.
While existing technologies like XML are capable of handling the structural and syntactic differences between the heterogeneous formats, these technologies cannot resolve any semantic incompatibilities.
In Earth Sciences, more than in any other science, the ensemble of these data is characterized by heterogeneous formats and graphical representation modes.
The capability to handle heterogeneous formats is obtained via the usage of a particular conceptual model, called SDR-Network, which is able to uniformly represent and handle data sources with different formats.
Big data introduces the era of data with new challenges such as petabyte scale structured and unstructured data sets which are growing at an exponential rate and have heterogeneous formats.
During the design phase of a chemical plant, information is created by various software tools and stored in heterogeneous formats, such as technical documents, CAE databases, or simulation files.
In this paper, we present a prototype system, an integrated data management system, which is capable of querying, retrieving, and visualizing datasets with heterogeneous formats and large sizes without requiring users to have any knowledge of any other specific software.
For example, the data collected by the technologies of the intelligent transportation systems (ITS) are increasingly complex and are characterized by heterogeneous formats, large volume, nuances in spatial and temporal processes, and frequent real-time processing requirements.
Scientific computing in complex product engineering design process has the characteristics of being tentative and iterative, which produces large scale intermediate data with heterogeneous formats and complex relationships, and the efficient organization and management of data becomes a bottleneck of product design performance.
