The strategies of integrating spatial data analysis and GIS

Abstract

The gap between SDA (Spatial Data Analysis) and GIS (Geographical Information Systems) existed for a long time. Presently this problem still remains in spite of a lot of theoretical and practical studies which try to find the solution for it. The research background and current situation about how to integrate SDA and GIS are introduced at first. The main idea of this article is to make sure what is the best scheme to bridge the gap between SDA and GIS and how to design it. There are a lot of factors to influence the standards to assess such a scheme, for instance, the attitude of users and GIS developers, the framework and related functions of current available GIS software in the market and so on. But the two most important ones of them are efficiency and flexibility of the scheme itself. Efficiency can be measured by the convenient extent and temporal length when it is used for carrying out SDA. Flexibility means users can define their own SDA methods. The best integration scheme should satisfy the two standards at the same time. A group of functions, which can be combined to implement any SDA method, are defined in order to design such an integration scheme. The functions are divided into five classes according to their properties.