Abstract: With the development of GIS application ceaselessly,a mass of multi-scale geo-spatial data need to be analyzed and represented.The fundamentals of lifting scheme and the three constructing steps,are presented.As an example,the lifting scheme and the binary wavelet transform are applied to compress a certain DEM.Comparing with these two methods,it is easy to conclude that the lifting scheme has more than two superiorities.The experimental results show that the lifting scheme has excellent performance in DEM data multi-scale representation.