A Unified Approach for Spatial Data Query

With the rapid development in Geographic Information Systems (GISs) and their applications, more and more geo-graphical databases have been developed by different vendors. However, data integration and accessing is still a big problem for the development of GIS applications as no interoperability exists among different spatial databases. In this paper we propose a unified approach for spatial data query. The paper describes a framework for integrating information from repositories containing different vector data sets formats and repositories containing raster datasets. The presented approach converts different vector data formats into a single unified format (File Geo-Database “GDB”). In addition, we employ “metadata” to support a wide range of users’ queries to retrieve relevant geographic information from heterogeneous and distributed repositories. Such an employment enhances both query processing and performance.