Design and Architectural Implications of a Spatial Information System

Image analysis, at the higher levels, works with extracted regions and line segments and their properties, not with the original raster data. Thus a spatial information system must be able to store points, lines, and areas as well as their properties and interrelationships. In a previous paper (Shapiro and Haralick [22]), we proposed for this purpose an entity-oriented relational database system. In this paper we describe our first experimental spatial information system, which employs these concepts to store and retrieve watershed data for a portion of the state of Virginia. We describe the logical and physical design of the system and discuss the architectural implications.