APPLICATION OF OBJECT-ORIENTED DATABASES TO GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION-SYSTEMS

Geographic information systems (GISs) are required to support a wide range of applications, many of which involve vast quantities of data, typically requiring data structures and access paths not conveniently represented using traditional record-based data models. The object-oriented approach to database management has been developed principally to cater for engineering and scientific applications whose data are naturally viewed as a collection of objects. The question addressed by the paper is whether the object-oriented modelling semantics are suitable for geographic information and the spatial nature of relationships between objects. Three views of geographic information are presented and the object-oriented approach to data representation is examined in the light of each view. Examples of GIS functionality are based on a system developed by the authors.