Database Engines for Geographical Information Systems

Our ability to identify, acquire, store, enquire on and analyse data is increasing as never before, especially in the GIS field. Technologies are becoming available to manage a wider variety of data and to make intelligent inferences on that data. The mainstream arrival of large-scale database engines is not far away. The experience of using the first such products tells us that they will radically change data management in the GIS field.

Capturing temporality and intentionality in information systems

Information modelling is a topic that has been researched a great deal, but still many questions around it have not been solved. An information model is essential in the design of a database which is the core of an information system. Currently most of databases only deal with information that represents facts, or asserted information. The ability of capturing semantic aspect has to be improved, and yet other types, such as temporal and intentional information, should be considered. Semantic Analysis, a method of information modelling, has offered a way to handle various aspects of information. It employs the domain knowledge and communication acts as sources of information modelling. It lends itself to a uniform structure whereby semantic, temporal and intentional information can be captured, which builds a sound foundation for building a semantic temporal database.