An Object-Oriented Model for the Sustainable Management of Evolving Spatio-temporal Information.

The sustainable management of geographic information through time is fundamental in the field of spatial planning, because handling of long-term statistical indicators is useful for setting up prospective scenarios. Sustainability means the control of complex information which is often incomplete: data come from multiple scales and heterogeneous grids, from various suppliers, at many dates, with a semantic which keeps evolving. Under these conditions, a framework for data quality assessment and estimation of missing values is necessary. This paper draws out a proposition for a system based on an object oriented spatio-temporal data model fit to figure out some relationships of interest when managing missing values, and providing a support for storage and exploitation of metadata through the usage of thematic and geographic ontologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]