Spatial and Spatiotemporal Data Types as a Foundation for Representing Space-Time Data in GIS

Abstract

A data type comprises a set of homogeneous values together with a collection of operations defined on them. This chapter emphasizes the importance of crisp spatial data types, fuzzy spatial data types, and spatiotemporal data types for representing static, vague, and time-varying geometries in Geographical Information Systems (GIS). These data types provide a fundamental abstraction for modeling the geometric structure of crisp spatial, fuzzy spatial, and moving objects in space and time as well as their relationships, properties, and operations. The goal of this chapter is to provide an overview and description of these data types and their operations that have been proposed in research and can be found in GIS, spatial databases, moving objects databases, and other spatial software tools. The use of data types, operations, and predicates will be illustrated by their embedding into query languages.