A geographical information system

Abstract

Geographic information system (GIS) is a system which is used to store, display, and analyze geographically referenced data (locations). GIS is also defined as a mapping and information system which enables users to analyze geographic data in a various ways. GIS provides numerous applications in practice. The GIS manipulates spatial data such as locations and extents. It also supports various types of spatial queries, including the range search and the nearest neighbor query. Range search query specifies a query region and retrieves all the spatial entities within this region. Nearest neighbor query obtains the spatial entities nearest to a given query point. Although old database systems can perform these queries and operations, they have poor performance with a slow speed, especially for large databases. In addition, there are no existing databases or related products which fully support spatial data manipulation. Hence, the GIS plays an important role as a new database system that utterly supports the spatial data manipulation. An R*-tree is an index structure which can manage spatial data efficiently. It can be applied for manipulating spatial data and it is used to construct a spatial database for GIS. The R*-tree index structure is so powerful that it can manipulate spatial data and handle these queries efficiently. It is important to develop the database system which uses the R*-tree index structure and the search algorithms for R*-tree. The aim of this project is to design and implement a primitive database system which is powerful enough to support basic GIS functionalities which can store and index spatial data. It can also answer range search and nearest neighbor queries efficiently with friendly user interface. The system is also compatible with different sets of spatial data.