Conceptual Modeling of Geographic Information System Applications

An important research trend in databases is to handle different types of uncertainty at both conceptual and logical levels for various non-traditional applications that may involve imprecision and uncertainty that have been difficult to integrate cohesively in simple database models. In this study we describe how to conceptually model complex and uncertain information at the conceptual level (by utilizing the ExIFO2 model) for Geographic Information System (GIS) applications. We also give the mapping algorithm that transforms the conceptual schema of GIS applications into the logical database structures by utilizing the fuzzy object-oriented database (FOOD) model at the logical level. The types of uncertainty that we mainly focus in this paper are fuzzy, null, and incomplete information related to objects and their properties, classes, and relationships among objects and classes of GIS applications.