Management of integrity constraints for multi-scale geospatial data

Abstract

Work on multi-scale issues concerning geospatial data presents countless challenges that have been long attacked by GIScience (Geographic Information Science) researchers. Indeed, a given real world problem must often be studied at distinct scales in order to be solved. Another factor to be considered is the possibility of maintaining the history of changes at each scale. Moreover, one of the main goals of multi-scale environments is to guarantee the manipulation of information without any contradiction among the different representations. The concept of scale goes beyond issues of space, since it also applies, for instance, to time. These problems will be analyzed in this thesis, resulting in the following contributions: (a) the proposal of the DBV (Database Version) multi-scale model to handle data at multiple scales from a database perspective; (b) the specification of multi-scale integrity constraints; (c) the implementation of a platform to support model and constraints, tested with real multi-scale data.vii I would like to thank Dr. Alexandre Continho from CNPTIA -Embrapa, who provided real world multi-scale data and feedback for our case study.I would also like to thank many other people that were not mentioned but also believed, supported, participated, collaborated with this work and nevertheless remain anonymous in these acknowledgments.