A System for Change Documentation Based on a Spatiotemporal Database

The evolution of geographic phenomena has been one of the concerns of spatiotemporal database research. However, in a large spectrum of geographical applications, users need more than a mere representation of data evolution. For instance, in urban management applications—e.g., cadastral evolution—users often need to know why, how, and by whom certain changes have been performed as well as their possible impact on the environment. Answers to such queries are not possible unless supplementary information concerning real world events is associated with the corresponding changes in the database and is managed efficiently. This paper proposes a solution to this problem, which is based on extending a spatiotemporal database with a mechanism for managing documentation on the evolution of geographic information. This solution has been implemented in a GIS-based prototype, which is also discussed in the paper.