Abstract
This paper presents the development of the first geographical information system (GIS) that may be used to manipulate a single dataset at a very large range of scales (different detail levels). The design of this multi-scale GIS is fully integrated in the open DBMS Postgres and the open GIS GEO + + . Besides the system design, this paper will also give details of the implementation in the Postgres DBMS environment of three generalization tools: 1. the BLG-tree for line and area simplification, 2. the Reactive-tree for selection based on importance and location, and 3. the GAP-tree for solving problems when using the other two structures for an area partitioning. Together with the geographical frontend, the DBMS forms the flexible basis for the realization of powerful GIS applications. The implementation has been successfully benchmarked with two large datasets: World Databank II and DLMS DFAD. The response times improve by one to two orders of magnitude.
Notes
†Parts of this paper are based on the paper The Design and Implementation of a Multi-Scale GIS, which has been awarded the first prize at the EGIS'93 conference, Genoa (van Oosterom & Schenkelaars, 1993).