DEDUGIS: Deductive constraint databases for intelligent geographical information systems

• Research unit: EU RFP
• Project number: 99.0156

Key words (English)

Geographic information systems; database; data modeling; constraints; deductive systems

Alternative project number (English)

EU project number: 28115

Research programs (English)

EU-programme: 4. Frame Research Programme - 1.3 Telematic systems

Short description (English)

See abstract

Partners and International Organizations (English)

Coordinator: CNUCE (I)

Abstract (English)

The current generation of GIS poorly addresses few important demands coming from the applications, such as:
1.the ability to express spatio-temporal correlation by means of high-level mechanisms;
2.the ability to integrate and transparently interact with heterogeneous information sources and problem solvers, as well as multiple reasoning methods and mathematical models.
Representative application fields for the above demands are Cadastral data management and Environmental monitoring. The first has strong requirements for historical analysis of spatial objects. The second suffers from the conceptual mismatch between the analog data model used by Environmental scientists, i.e., continuous fields on a spatio-temporal support, and the sampling of such fields which involves a discretization in spatial and time domain.
This project aims at the creation of methods and tools that make logic programming based software the right glue technology for constructing knowledge-intensive GIS applications. The project intends to demonstrate how the use of a relatively small fragment of deductive database and constraint logic programming can bring a large added value in terms of expressiveness and ease of use to the resulting system. The ultimate goal of the project is to open up to a new generation of Geographical Information Systems, characterized by enhanced capabilities to support spatio-temporal reasoning and semantic integration of diverse data models.
In particular, the project plans to deliver:
- a methodology to conservatively extend current GIS technology;
- the design of a software component, named DEDUGIS, to be used in the development environment of GIS applications able to obtain the above enhanced capabilities;
- application demonstrators developed using such new capabilities, in the area of Cadastral (Real Estate) Data Management and Environmental monitoring.
The design of DEDUGIS will be based upon the identification and amalgamation of a repertoire of programming facilities, distilled from:
- deductive constraint databases, which merge deductive databases and constraint logic programming, and
- logic-based mediator languages, which declaratively support the semantic integration of heterogeneous data.

References in databases (English)

Swiss Database: Euro-DB of the
State Secretariat for Education and Research
Hallwylstrasse 4
CH-3003 Berne, Switzerland
Tel. [phone]
Swiss Project-Number: 99.0156