Management of massive point cloud data: wet and dry November 26 2009, de Meern, the Netherlands Dirk Voets Imagen Visualization and analysis of massive point clouds; tackling the issues, now and in the future Point clouds obviously represent enormous amounts of data, and therefore analyzing and visualizing these datasets is a true challenge. ERDAS and Leica have many years of experience creating these point clouds, but visualizing them is something that we have taken up fairly recently. The new approach there is not to see point clouds as 'an irregular raster model', or as a triangulated irregular network, but as a true own datatype in itself. This has proven to be more fruitful than squeezing point clouds in a TIN structure. Another thing that ERDAS has actively picked up is the intense use of open source activities in this field. The Open Source community has actively worked towards solutions in this field. The LIBLAS library for storing point clouds in the LAS format is a very good example of that. Instead of coming up with own solutions, thereby stovepiping the field of play, ERDAS has adopted the LAS format, and is working with the open source community to better tackle the implicit issues of handling and visualizing these point clouds.