An ISO TC 211 Conformant Approach to Model Spatial Integrity Constraints in the Conceptual Design of Geographical Databases

Abstract

The ISO TC 211 standards have defined a set of formal models for\ud the conceptual modeling of spatial data using the Unified Modeling Language\ud (UML) and the geometry approach adopted by the ISO spatial data model and\ud by the Geographic Mark-up Language (GML). This approach aims to define a\ud conceptual model for the design of geographic databases and for the geospatial\ud interoperability of heterogeneous spatial databases. The ISO standards are however\ud complex and counterintuitive in dealing with spatial integrity constraints,\ud which are fundamental for the expressiveness of a conceptual model in the geographic\ud application domain. This paper improves the ISO approach by proposing\ud a framework which allows the definition of powerful, easy to use, and ISO\ud conformant modeling abstractions for topological spatial constraints. These\ud modeling abstractions have been incorporated in the definition of the GeoUML\ud conceptual model used in the Italian IntesaGIS project for the definition of the\ud “core” database of the Italian Spatial Data Infrastructure

Geospatial spreadsheets with microscale air quality visualization and synchronization for supporting multiple-scenario visual collaboration

“…The data formats used for visual integration were 3DS (.3ds) for buildings, TIFF (.tif) for surface texture images and American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII, .asc) for terrain surfaces, which followed a Cartesian coordinate system with a Transverse Mercator (TM) projection. The geospatial data followed the standards of Technical Committee 211 of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO/TC 211) as digital geographic information (Belussi et al 2006). …”