geoPOM: a heterogeneous geoscientific persistent object system

Lately, a need for uniform access to and integration of data stored in specialized, non-standard repositories such as GIS or multimedia storage servers has become apparent. The authors provide an overview of a heterogeneous geoscientific persistent object manager (geoPOM) developed at the UCLA Data Mining Laboratory. GeoPOM provides users with the "illusion" of a single object-oriented spatial data store even though the data is actually stored in several different spatial data repositories, thus, allowing users to define and handle spatial data in a uniform manner The geoPOM data model is based on the ODMG-93 standard for object-oriented data models, and the Open Geodata Consortium's (OGC) standardization effort for temporal-spatial object types (OGIS).