GIS elemental unit representations of spatial data are often defined in terms of points, lines and areas. However, another type of spatial data that is becoming frequently captured, but as yet is largely ignored in GIS, is that of video. While digital video recording is a commonly encountered medium in modern society and encompasses many forms, from simple personal camcorders through to sophist...

The three dimensional Geographic Information System (3D GIS) is an area of intensive investigations. A 3D GIS should be a system capable of maintaining and analyzing 3D spatial and thematic properties of real geographic objects. Most of the research efforts concentrate on stand-alone solutions. However, recent innovative technologies developed on the World Wide Web allow client-server alternati...

One of the most powerful capabilities of GIS, particularly for the earth and environmental sciences, is that it permits the derivation of new attributes from attributes already held in the GIS database. For example, elevation data in the form of a digital elevation model (DEM) can be used to derive maps of gradient and aspect (Hutchinson and Gallant, Chapter 9); or digital maps of soil type and...

Spatial dependency and spatial embedding are basic physical properties of many phenomena modeled by networks. The most indicated computational environment to deal with spatial information is to use Georeferenced Information System (GIS) and Geographical Database Management Systems (GDBMS). Several models have been proposed in this direction, however there is a gap in the literature in generic f...

One of the fundamental issues of geographical information science is to design GIS interfaces and functionalities in a way that is easy to understand, teach, and use. Unfortunately, current geographical information systems (including ArcGIS) remains very difficult to use as spatial analysis tools, because they organize and expose functionalities according to GIS data structures and processing a...

Public and private organizations throughout Europe have recognized that spatial data has become an integral part of their knowledge base. The demand for GIS interoperability and advanced methods of classifying GIS data through metadata initiatives are a result of this recognition. Despite considerable advances major, difficulties are apparent in the formalizations of semantics, language and ont...

Nowadays, there are an emergence of spatial or geographic data stored in several and heterogeneous databases, mostly in Geographic Information Systems (GIS). The diversity of GIS and the increasing accumulation of non-spatial (simple attributes) and spatial (geometric shapes) data make it difficult to apply conventional OLAP and data mining tools. Thus, the need to build a spatial data warehous...

GIS software development is now moving in the direction of components. The design of a two-dimensional GIS componentware – MapManager, which is based on the COM/DCOM technology, is introduced here. In the process of GIS software design, we should mainly consider the following aspects: spatial database design, visualization, data interface, spatial query and analysis, editing and mapping. At las...

This tutorial provides a foundation in GIS including its basic structure and concepts, and spatial analysis. Spatial Decision Support Systems are introduced, emphasizing one current model. The links of GIS to related technologies such as GPS, wireless, location-based technologies, and RFID are examined. The tutorial gives an overview of vertical-sector uses of GIS, and concentrates on a few exa...