An object-oriented conceptual model for the representation of geographic information

The interest of the DP community towards geographic databases is large. The drawbacks of traditional database systems when used for handling unstructured data have been largely pointed out in the literature. At present, research efforts are concentrated on the investigation of the usability of the object-oriented approach for developing a new generation of powerful geographic database systems. The complexity of geographic systems, in terms of relationships to be modelled and operations to be performed on data, is well-known; therefore a conceptual analysis of the specific situation is a good strategy for handling the complexity of the implementation. The authors propose an object-oriented conceptual model tailored for organizing and representing basic map elements and their relationships, as well as operations of interest for the management of geographic data. The aim is to provide designers with a conceptual tool useful for organizing their knowledge about a geographic application in terms of basic concepts of the object-oriented paradigm, namely classes, instances, and methods