Extending a deductive object-oriented database system with spatial data handling facilities

The demand for spatial information systems has been growing sharply in recent years. Unfortunately, the current state of mainstream database technology has not facilitated the development of spatial information systems that are as eeective, eecient and usable as, e.g., management information systems. Attempts to overcome the limitations that underlie this relative lack of support have tended to be accompanied by problems with the productivity of application development and with the runtime performance of the modiied system. This paper describes the integration of a spatial data handling component with the ROCK & ROLL deductive object-oriented database system. The extended ROCK & ROLL system provides much more comprehensive and better integrated database programming facilities than other candidate platforms for spatial information systems. The extended system serves developers with an intuitive, expressive, formally deened collection of spatial data types as primitive types whose operations have state-of-the-art computational complexity. The integration of these types with the object-oriented modelling, imperative programming and deductive querying facilities of ROCK & ROLL makes available a comprehensive and integrated suite of complementary mechanisms for the development of spatial information systems.