Documenting Changes in a Spatiotemporal Database

Abstract

Spatiotemporal databases have been extensively used to represent the evolution of geographic phenomena. However, in a large spectrum of geographical applications, users need more than a mere representation of data evolution. For instance, in urban management applications- e.g., cadastral evolution- users often need to know why, how and by whom certain changes have been performed or their impact on the environment. Answers to these queries are not possible unless supplementary information concerning real world events is associated with the corresponding changes in the database. This paper proposes a solution to this problem, which is based on extending a spatiotemporal database with a mechanism for managing documentation on the evolution o