Spatial and Topological Data Models

Spatial and topological data models are increasingly important in business applications such as urban development planning, transportation and traffic control, decision support in agriculture, pollution and environment analysis, fire and flood prevention, etc. that require handling spatial and topological data more efficiently and more effectively than older models, for example the relational data model. In this survey we compare several alternative spatial and topological data models: the Spaghetti Data Model, the Vague Region Data Model, the Topological Data Model, Worboys’ Spatiotemporal Data Model and the Constraint Data Model. We first describe how spatial and/or topological data are represented and give examples for each data model. We also illustrate by examples the use of an appropriate query language for each data model. THE SPAGHETTI DATA MODEL The Spaghetti data model (Laurini and Thompson, 1992) is a popular model for representing spatial data that occur in for example Computer-Aided-Design (CAD) (Kemper and Wallrath, 1987) and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) (Worboys, 1995; Zeiler, 1997) applications. The reason why this model is so popular is that there are many efficient algorithms for detecting properties in this model (Preparata and Shamos, 1985). In addition, the Spaghetti model is simple to use and offers in most applications a sufficient approximation to reality. There are several extensions of this model, for example the parametric 2-spaghetti (Chomicki and Revesz, 1999) and the parametric rectangles (Cai et al., 2000) models, which we do not review here.