Patent ID: 8527476

Claim:
A method for handling data comprising: storing and combining data, by at least one computing device, for a geographic region in a volumetric storage unit (VSU) database, which is also referred to as a voxel, configured to form a common repository from a plurality of different source products, wherein the VSU database is a volumetric storage space of a plurality of different volumetric storage units (VSUs); storing semantic content describing the data using attributes having a probabilistic parameter that defines a level of confidence for each value of the semantic content; creating from the common repository via the at least one computing device a specifically tailored product for each of a plurality of different applications by: receiving, by the VSU database, requests from the plurality of different applications for data in the VSU database; for each of the requests, determining and applying, via the at least one computing device, a filter to conditionally exclude certain data of the VSU database not needed for the specifically tailored product; for each of the requests, using the probabilistic parameter to negate data having a certain level of uncertainty having a level of confidence below a certain threshold, and for each of the requests, providing the specifically tailored product; wherein data elements are stored to specific ones of the VSUs in the VSU database, wherein a spatial position of the data elements within the volumetric storage space is defined at least in part by which of the VSUs the data elements are stored.