MurMur: Database Management of Multiple Representations

Successful information management implies the ability to design accurate representations of the real world of interest to targeted applications. Current systems do not provide representation schemes supporting the diversity of user needs. In the context of interoperability, as in Web access to heterogeneous data sources, they cannot properly integrate the diversity of stored representations. The objective of the European project described in this paper, MurMur, is to enhance GIS (or DBMS) functionality so that, relying on more flexible representation schemes, users may easily manage information using multiple representations. The added functionality will support multiple coexisting representations of the same real-word phenomena (semantic flexibility), including representations of geographic data at multiple resolutions (cartographic flexibility). This will in particular make possible a semantically meaningful management of multi-scale, integrated, and temporal geo-