Establishing a postgraduate research programme in spatial data management

To cope with the supervision of increasing numbers of postgraduate students, a useful strategy is to establish research programmes comprising a number of interrelated projects. The success of such a programme is dependent upon the existence of clearly stated long-term and medium-term objectives. The paper describes a research programme, being developed within the University of Otago´s Department of Information Science, centred on issues related to the analysis, design and development of spatially referenced databases. The programme aims to specify and validate theoretical models, and to develop software tools, for the management of spatially referenced databases