Design of a geographic information system using OPS5

Geographic information systems (GIS) is one technology that is driven more by applications rather than by abstract principles. Existing GISs store spatial data in the form of relations. This leads to ambiguities and inconsistencies in the query processing. A rule-based system (RBS), also known as production system, is a more elegant choice for implementing a GIS, since RBSs address the need to capture, represent, store, and reason about human knowledge on the basis of conditional if-then rules. This paper describes the implementation of a GIS using OPS5, a production system language. For the prototype, a medium-sized city, with two rivers, a lake, a railway track, different categories of roads, buildings, and offices, was chosen