Issues and prospects for the next generation of the spatial data transfer standard (SDTS)

Abstract

The Spatial Data Transfer Standard (SDTS) was designed to be capable of representing virtually any data model, rather than being a prescription for a single data model. It has fallen short of this ambitious goal for a number of reasons, which this paper investigates. In addition to issues that might have been anticipated in its design, a number of new issues have arisen since its initial development. These include the need to support explicit feature de® nitions, incremental update, value-added extensions, and change tracking within large, national databases. It is time to consider the next stage of evolution for SDTS. This paper suggests development of an Object Pro® le for SDTS that would integrate concepts for a dynamic schema structure, OpenGIS interface, and CORBA IDL.

An Identity Crisis in the Life Sciences

“…In addition, local identities are published for these data products, such as Taverna LSIDs and VDL's Logical File Names. The autonomous nature of the current bioinformatics domain makes it hard to adopt a global naming service unless a community-wide agreement is achieved, such as the data transfer standard in earth science [19] and in the caBIG project 11 . Our problem is particularly acute in that we do not prescribe a closed, strongly typed data environment such as that dictated by caBIG.…”

Ontology-driven geographic information systems

“…In order to solve this problem, it is necessary to (1) generate a buffer of 150 ft along the centerline of the existing road; (2) select and group the parcels touched by the buffer; and (3) add up the values of the properties. To do this with a geographic information system it is necessary to access the geographic databases of the two cities over a network, select and retrieve the desired features, and then apply the buffer operation (Table 1).…”

“…Alternatives that avoid this problem are usually more complex, like the Spatial Data Transfer Standard (SDTS) and the Spatial Archive and Interchange Format (SAIF). A modernization proposal for SDTS using an object profile that integrates a dynamic schema structure, an OpenGIS interface, and the Common Object Request Broker Architecture Interface Definition Language (CORBA IDL) is presented in [2]. A broader discussion of geographic information exchange formats can be found in [30].…”

Geospatial Semantic Web

“…The purpose of SDTS is to promote and facilitate the transfer of digital spatial data among different computer systems, while preserving information meaning and minimizing the need for information external to the transfer. With anticipated extensions and refinements, SDTS was expected to become an important data format for ITS spatial data transfer or a neutral format for data archiving (Arctur et al 1998).…”

“…Several barriers block the popularity of SDTS. These barriers include the complexity of SDTS, slowness in the development of practical SDTS profiles, restriction of each SDTS dataset to a single profile, lack of a clear definition of geospatial features in SDTS, and ambiguity in the means of specifying cardinality of relationships in a data model (Arctur et al 1998).…”