What is MDS

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) (Faïz, 1999) are being increasingly used to manage, retrieve, and store large quantities of data which are tedious to handle manually. The GIS power is to help managers make critical decisions they face daily. The ability to make sound decisions relies upon the availability of relevant information. Typically, spatial databases do not contain much information that could support the decision making process in all situations. Besides, Jack Dangermond, president of a private GIS software company, argued that “The application of GIS is limited only by the imagination of those who use it”. Hence, it is of primary interest to provide other data sources to make these systems rich information sources.