Workshop on Voronoi Methods for Handling Geographic Data Spatial Adjacency as the Basis for Spatial Data Structures

This review is intended to supplement the Spatial Data Handling Symposium Workshop by giving the main lines of argument leading to the development of the Voronoi spatial model. Three points will be emphasized. Firstly, the objects used to create a seamless data structure (i.e. one without holes or joins) are themselves discrete, even if the world they came from is not. Secondly, a flexible data structure should be "dynamic", permitting the immediate insertion and deletion of individual map objects without destroying the underlying spatial linkages (which would then require a complete "rebuild" operation for even small changes). Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, there are other ways of thinking about spatial data structures than the raster model, or the point/line/polygon model of the last fifteen years.