Spatial data types provide a fundamental abstraction for modeling the structure of geometric entities in space (geometry) as well as their relationships (topology), e.g. points, lines, polygons, regions, etc. A spatial object is an object with at least one attribute of a spatial data type.
Published in Chapter:
Query Processing in Spatial Databases
Antonio Corral (University of Almeria, Spain) and Michael Vassilakopoulos (University of Central Greece, Greece)
Copyright: © 2009
|Pages: 10
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-242-8.ch030
Abstract
Spatial data management has been an active area of intensive research for more than two decades. In order to support spatial objects in a database system several important issues must be taken into account such as: spatial data models, indexing mechanisms and efficient query processing. A spatial database system (SDBS) is a database system that offers spatial data types in its data model and query language and supports spatial data types in its implementation, providing at least spatial indexing and efficient spatial query processing (Güting, 1994). The main reason that has caused the active study of spatial database management systems (SDBMS) comes from the needs of the existing applications such as geographical information systems (GIS), computer-aided design (CAD), very large scale integration design (VLSI), multimedia information systems (MIS), data warehousing, multi-criteria decision making, location-based services, etc.