Oregon Relational Spatial Topology (ORST) representation

Abstract

We designed a concise way to store and manipulate GIS coverage data in a geospatial database. Our geospatial database is implemented with PostgreSQL and PostGIS. PostgreSQL is an object-relational database, and PostGIS supports various geospatial operations as an SQL extension. In our Oregon Relational Spatial Topology (ORST) approach, topological relationships among polygons, arcs, and points are represented explicitly. With this explicit representation of polygon data, such spatial operations as moving a point, merging a polygon, and splitting a polygon can be supported with relative ease. In order to populate this database, we developed a process for converting polygon data stored as an ESRI shapefile first to the ESRI E00 coverage format and then to the ORST representation. We also implemented the spatial operations discussed above.