Great China Regional Manager
Environment Systems
Research Institute, USA
[email protected]
Abstract
In last three decades, huge amount of geo-spatial information have been collected, stored and managed in GIS for various applications. Digital Earth, digital regions, digital cities and many projects target to represent our environment by digitized information. One important trend is to collect and to represent not only geo-spatial data, but also to collect knowledge into geo-spatial database. Smarter geo-databases will help us to build smarter, more efficient and user-friendlier GIS systems. New generation of GIS technology allows users to collect basic common sense knowledge bound tightly with geo-spatial data, and allows this knowledge to rule behavior of these spatial data in applications. This trend of bounding knowledge with spatial data together makes "feature-oriented" objects in GIS practicable. It already shows significant power in GIS applications that need richer knowledge to fit gaps between conventional spatial data and complex user self-defined features. At beginning stage, knowledge in collection may only at very low level as common sense. However, it has attracted many attentions from GIS community. For examples, it creates new works for many map data producers who may consider including knowledge collection to add more values for their data products. They want to produce geo-database at more intelligent "feature-oriented" level. Considering there are many new GIS projects and new GIS industrial players pop up in Asia, it is expected that this trend of knowledge representation and collection into Geo-database will benefit more to GIS community in Asia.
