Development of a Conceptual Data Model for Digital Spatio-Temporal Geographical Information, with Application to Several Themes and GIS

Abstract

A Geographical Information System (GIS) is a system capable of inputting, analyzing and visualizing geographical data. Despite several theoretical studies concerning spatio-temporal data models (e.g. snapshot model, space-time composite model, triad model), the current commercial systems do not support the temporal aspect, i.e. maintenance of history information and storage and querying and visualization of geographical data with a temporal dimension. As the link between the geographical data and the non-geographical attributes is important in a GIS, the (spatial) data model is mostly based on a hybrid approximation of a two- or three-dimensional space and an n-dimensional semantic table. A spatio-temporal data model, however, is far more complex than a space + time model due to the complexity of space and time.