The core scientific methodology used in this project is the physical fields theory. Using this theory landscape and its components are represented by scalar, vector and tensor fields. This is a key concept in surface modeling using interpolation functions and differential geometry in order to derive new 3D morphometry parameters.
In the project methodology we also use specific computer science methods, especially software engineering methods to design and implement new algorithms for parallel processing of some calculation procedures used in computationally very intensive calculations within the GIS modules. Laser scanning produces tens to hundreds of millions of points depending on the extent of the area. These massive data sets as well as some specific, highly computationally demanding calculations such as interpolation and numeric simulations (e.g., water overland flow, solar radiation distribution) require very high computer resources. Therefore we have selected open-source GRASS GIS (grass.osgeo.org) to implement the parallelization solutions.