Enhancing Operations with Spatial Access Methods in a Database Management System for GIS

Abstract

Much attention has been devoted in the past to support classes of applications which are not well served by conventional database systems. Focusing on the application domain of geographic information systems (GIS), several architectural approaches have been proposed to implement commercial or prototype systems and satisfy the urgent needs for geographic data handling. However, those systems suffer from several limitations because they either perform much processing on an application layer, which is at the top of the database management system (DBMS), or the underlying data models are not rich enough to represent the spatial dimension of geographic entities. This study examines the spatial operations that should be provided by a DBMS for the application domain of GIS and focuses on the various techniques which may be used to support the efficient execution of both simple operations and composite procedures that involve the spatial dimension of geographic entities.