National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis

The two articles that comprise this technical report address a fundamental problem for geographic information, namely the modeling of space, from two different points of view. In today’s GIS a number of methods to model space are used, often without sufficient theoretical analysis. In geographical research, appropriate concepts for modeling space are used, again often without a discussion of their implicit simplifications and restrictions. In his paper, Michael Goodchild addresses this problem by proposing a single unifying spatial concept to which many other concepts can be linked. Andrew Frank’s article describes the building of a framework for the terms spatial concepts, geometric data model and spatial data structure, and defines theses notions and gives examples.