Ontologies, as “formal and explicit specifications of shared conceptualizations” [1] play a predominant role when developing information systems. This role is increasingly recognised by geo and urban experts when dealing with urban (geo) spatial information systems (GIS, SIS) and spatial databases (SDB). Generally speaking, they provide significant benefits for the design and use of geographic ...

This is an exploratory study examining the predictors of geographic information systems (GIS) adoption among nonprofit organizations. A variety of organization, system, and environment characteristics are measured via a survey administered to 72 managers of nonprofit organizations. Comparisons are made between GIS and website adoption by these organizations. Results indicate that nonprofit mana...

Most current geographic information systems assume and present the static world. But, new generations of GIS applications have much more demands in comparison to possibilities, which could provide traditional database management systems. Information that exists in the spatial database may be updated over time. Also, the very important demand is time capability to answer to state changing in dat...

Geographic information systems (GIS) have developed in response to a range of needs, and provide highly structured environments for working with particular classes of information. The environment and structure of a GIS is defined by its data model; the paper reviews the basic data models of GIS. The needs of discrete transportation modeling have led to a number of extensions of the basic data m...

Academic libraries are a prime example of an enterprise whose mission is to support the information needs of its institution. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and remote sensing (RS) are popular topics for academic research and are used globally. Two major enterprise information service and data delivery models, centralized and distributed, describe how enterprises approach information shar...

The practice of spatial thinking involves applying multiple spatial concepts during processes of reasoning, and it is a constant component of our daily professional and personal lives. Certain concepts such as location, scale, representation, and distance play particularly important roles in the teaching and learning of geographic information systems (GIS). As GIS is increasingly used by people...

Tom Ingold, Boundless Tom Ingold is CTO of Boundless, an open source geographic information system (GIS) company. Tom joined Boundless from Booz Allen, where he was developing OGC services and architectures in the defense and intel markets. Tom has experience in agile systems and building GIS systems in production environments. He has a BA in Natural Sciences from Harvard and a postgrad certifi...

Geographic information systems (GIS) have developed in response to a range of needs, and provide highly structured environments for working with particular classes of information. The environment and structure of a GIS is defined by its data model; the paper reviews the basic data models of GIS. The needs of discrete transportation modeling have led to a number of extensions of the basic data m...

Good acquaintance with an organization’s business rules is an undeniable success factor in a decision-making process. In environmental studies, decisions are multidisciplinary, rule oriented and are very much related to spatiality. SPeCS (Spatial Decision Support Collaborative System) is a framework which intends to support the aspects of multi-criteria spatial analysis within a distributed GIS...

Fuzzy spatial objects have become more and more important in GIS applications. When spatial phenomena are generalized by the crisp form, a lot of quantitative information is lost. Land cover as a fuzzy spatio-temporal object should be modeled in a fuzzy framework. In addition, topological relations between fuzzy spatial objects are much more complicated than that are defined between crisp spati...