WORLDCOMP'10 Tutorial: Prof. Ray Kresman

With the advent of mobile and wireless-enabled devices, a number of graphical and location-enabled applications, which have moved well beyond the realm of traditional geographical information systems, are emerging. For example, distance between two points in a city involves more than the location coordinates, the underlying themes such as street networks are required. An understanding of spatial and object database concepts is critical to the design of applications that capture the spatial dimension of information. However, these relatively new ideas are less well understood by students; few computer science programs cover them in their database, computational geometry, and graphics course offerings. This tutorial introduces the participants (educators, students, software developers) to the use of object-oriented and spatial database primitives in application design.

We describe how to store and manipulate graphical objects such as points, line segments, and more complex objects such as curves and polygons and maps. We show how features can be accessed interactively and through programming languages (Java). Where applicable, we illustrate these concepts using public domain database software (MySQL) and commercial software (Oracle). Finally, we explain how web-enabled and other applications can take advantage of mapping features to enhance their visual appeal.

• Introduction (5 minutes)
• Nonspatial and spatial data (15 minutes)
  - Geographic Information Systems
  - Spatial DBMS
  - Modeling approaches
  
• Object databases (30 minutes)
  
  - Type and object extension
  - Methods
  - Object as table attributes
  - Examples and code walk-through
  
• Spatial Types (30 minutes)
  - Basic data types
  - Complex geometries
  - Concave and convex representation
  - Examples
  
• Session Break (10 minutes)
  
• Spatial Query (40 minutes)
  
  - Spatial operators
  - Geometry processing functions
  - Manipulating geometry
  - Examples and code walk-through
  
• Maps (30 minutes)
  - Map components
  - Constructing themes
  - Style configuration
  - XML interface
  - Examples
  
• Q & A; Concluding Remarks (20 minutes)

• Compare and contrast GIS and spatial databases.
• Draw parallel between object oriented programming and object databases.
• Create and use database objects with data members and member functions.
• Understand use of Geometry data type.
• Construct and respond to spatial queries.
• Learn how to query metadata
• Understand XML interface to maps and how to render maps.
• Access database objects and geometry from programs.

WorldComp’10 conference attendees, especially educators, upper level computer science and or geography students who may or may not have had a course on spatial database, and software developers.

Ray Kresman is a Professor of Computer Science at Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, OH. His applied computer science interests include computer security and web-to-database connectivity, three-tier architectures and secure internet technologies, and data warehousing. Dr. Kresman's work on distributed systems was supported by the National Science Foundation. He has published widely in the area of distributed systems and complexity of algorithms.