Management of spatial data: basic issues and some solutions

The authors investigate the usability of the object-oriented paradigm to develop geographic applications, which involve an interesting category of spatial data. As a first step, abstract concepts such as map elements and their relationships are modeled. Specifically, a special kind of relationship (i.e. the conceptual link belongs-to) is proposed to model, in a uniform way, spatial properties concerning the intersection of two geographic elements (e.g. a river crosses a state), as well as the containment of a geographic area in another one (e.g. a country belongs to a continent). Then a large set of operations useful to manipulate geographic data is given according to existing literature. Finally, the authors propose a structure for objects (either classes or instances) specifically tailored for geographic applications