Spatial Data Types for Database Systems

Book excerpt: Database research in the last decade has increasingly focused on providing support for non-standard applications. One important domain is representation and processing of spatial information, needed, e.g., in geographical information systems. Spatial data types provide a fundamental abstraction for modeling the structure of geometric entities, their relationships, properties and operations. This monograph is an extensive survey of this field and introduces a new, general, sophisticated framework for the formal definition and robust implementation of spatial data types.