Spatial Databases: An Overview

Introduction

The extensive and increasing availability of collected data from geographical information system devices and technology has made it excessively difficult to manage these information using existing spatial database methods thus this has led to research advances in behavioural aspects of monitored subjects. Geographic information systems (GIS) can efficiently handle all the major tasks of information extraction (which include data input and data verification, storage and manipulation, output and presentation, data transformation and even interactions with the end users) from large datasets. This signifies that geographic information system are complete database management systems which can handle all the task mentioned above (Rigaux et al. 2003). Notwithstanding, based on the purpose of whatever application under a user’s consideration, the objects in these (GIS) databases must be properly modelled for real world data simplification (i.e. simplifying real world data so as to create an actual prototype of it) in other to enhance efficient performance of the database. To achieve this, data analyst constantly seek an appropriate data structure that efficiently stores the objects data in the database and allows for a better database management. Spatial databases maintain space information which is appropriate for applications where there is need to monitor the position of an object or event over space. Spatial databases describe the fundamental representation of the object of a dataset that comes from spatial or geographic entities. A spatial database supports aspects of space and offers spatial data types in its data model and query language. The spatial or geographic referencing attributes of the objects in a spatial database permits them to be positioned within a two (2) dimensional or three (3) dimensional space. A spatial database unlike the classical database do not only query data based on their attributes alone, they also have the capacity for querying data elements with respect to their locations. Spatial databases are built to compliment the classical database using some defined architecture (figure 2 a and b). This chapter looks into the fundamentals of spatial databases and describes their basic component, operations and architecture. Figure 1 shows a typical classical database system environment.

Figure 1.

Diagram showing a typical environment of database management