Categories of Geospatial and Temporal Integrity Constraints

Abstract

Integrity constraints play a major role when the logical consistency of a data set has to be evaluated during quality assurance. The paper reviews established approaches of integrity constraint classification and proposes a profound categorisation which distinguishes semantic integrity constraints according to the semantic domains of the involved properties. The categorisation provides the preconditions for formalisation and the identification of conflicts and redundancies in sets of integrity constraints. Therewith the management and usability of integrity constraints will be improved which will also result an improvement of spatial data quality.

Management of integrity constraints for multi-scale geospatial data

“…Integrity in the context of database systems is a property to ensure that there is no logical contradiction with a model of reality. For this, integrity constraints (IC) should be defined to guarantee that the database understands the semantics required by the model [28].…”

“…Thematic constraints refer to the consistency of thematic attributes (e.g., "buildings should be residential, commercial or industrial"). Finally, there are spatio-temporal constraints, that combine predicates on spatial and temporal attributes [43,28].…”

“…There are many other kinds of constraints for spatial data in the literature, e.g., the shape constraints of Mäs and Reinhardt [28]. Last but not least, several authors (e.g.…”