Some aspects of ellipsoidal distance enumeration in GIS applications

Abstract

The article is the introductory study for one of the fundamental geo-informatics operations - the reciprocal position calculation of Earth localities. It is known that, in general, this calculation leads up to an elliptic integral calculation. In a computer environment, the algorithms are determined by data storage precision. Furthermore, repeated calculation with numerous data results in deceleration of all the applications. In special cases, the accurate application of ellipsoidal trigonometry can be replaced by a procedure that is more elementary. This study discusses some of these procedures and demonstrates their application in a given task.