Managing the US Navy's first OO digital mapping project

ORVPF – the Model and its DNC Implementation

“…While a relational model, as implemented in DNC, is believed to be too restrictive for many spatial data applications (Egenhofer and Frank, 1989), the object oriented technology is argued to be well suited for the complex VPF/DNC data modeling (Shaw et al, 1996). In fact, Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) at the Stennis Space Center and the University of Florida's GeoPlan Center developed ODNC, which is a prototype OO viewer/editor for the Digital Nautical Chart (Shaw et al, 1996). Further, built upon the ODNC prototype, an OO database (OVPF) for four different VPF products was designed (Chung et al, 1995;Shaw et al, 1996).…”

“…In fact, Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) at the Stennis Space Center and the University of Florida's GeoPlan Center developed ODNC, which is a prototype OO viewer/editor for the Digital Nautical Chart (Shaw et al, 1996). Further, built upon the ODNC prototype, an OO database (OVPF) for four different VPF products was designed (Chung et al, 1995;Shaw et al, 1996). ODNC was initially implemented in SmallTalk.…”

“…The object-oriented principles of identity, encapsulation, inheritance and polymorphism (Jacobson et al, 1999;Rumbaugh et al, 1999) empower an object-oriented data model with capability to handle topological and other relationships among spatial feature objects directly and in a simple fashion (Shaw et al, 1996). We follow these basic principles to analyze the VPF data and to design the ORVPF model.…”