US Patent 8166042 Height based indexing

The present invention provides a system and method for height based indexing of data. In an embodiment, the present invention parses indexed data by (1) storing a geo-spatial multi-resolution data structure that represents a three dimensional environment, where at least a portion of the three dimensional environment lies within a view frustum; (2) traversing recursively the geo-spatial multi-resolution data structure, where the traversal is based on a range of coordinates that lie within the view frustum; and (3) extracting the indexed data from at least one vertical slice of at least one node of the geo-spatial multi-resolution data structure, where the extracted indexed data is displayed in the view frustum.