A Unified Version-based Spatio-temporal Data Model

Temporal Geographic Information System (TGIS), which aims to collect, manage and analyze dynamic geographic phenomena, is a hot scientific research field. The all-important task of developing a TGIS is to build the spatio-temporal database. Since data model is the core of a spatio-temporal database, many GIS researchers and experts of database community have made a lot of efforts about the spatio-temporal data model and many literatures and works have been published. Although some substantial data models have been put out, there are few feasible and acceptable ones. This paper attempts to address this problem. The advantages and disadvantages of some of the typical and important existing data models were briefly analyzed firstly in this paper. A novel unified version-based spatio-temporal data model (UVSTDM) is then proposed. Based on the conception of version, the evolution of geographic phenomena is represented by a series of object-versions and attribute-versions which are associated with temporal information. UVSTDM organizes the temporal data more effectively and treats spatial data and thematic or non-spatial data in a uniform way. With this model, the object states can be retrieved conveniently and the evolution history of an object or its attributes can be traced easily. * Corresponding author: [email protected]; phone +86-(0)21-65988851.