Geometry Updating for Geospatial Data Integration

Abstract

Lots of geospatial data has been collected within the last decades due to advances in digital spatial data capturing technologies and this has brought in different versions of the same data sets. Although various spatial and mapping organizations are updating and revising geospatial databases with new data/information about our rapidly changing environment; there are challenges of how to effectively and quickly update and adjust the geometries so that there are no sliver and dangling issues as a result of opening and overlaps due to variation between different versions of same data. This is vital in geospatial data updating and management in geosystems and databases. The paper describes an approach of geospatial geometry updating and adjustment basing on paradigm of point as being the simplest and smallest spatial primitive to handle and that it can be manipulated to define all geospatial data elements. It integrates methodologies from both earth sciences and computer science. Every unique identifiable spatial instance in form of point is given an identifier and it is this that is manipulated during geometry adjustment to transfer updates from the source/reference data to the data set being updated/adjusted. This approach solves the issue of silvers and dangling which are always created during data merging and the differences that are always brought into databases due to variations in data capture, storage, and manipulation approaches.