SAGIS: a proposal for a Sardinian Geographical Information System and an assessment of alternative implementation strategies

Abstract

The author has been preparing machine readable data on Sardinia collected from a wide variety of sources for over eight years. The data, scattered between over 300 ASCII data files, cover topics including medieval legislation, demographic statis tics, bibliographic references and environmental indicators. This paper examines the problem of integrating data where the required structures push the system designer towards using a range of software packages. As the bulk of the database is static a front end solution is proposed which accesses the packages using a single inverted file approach.