Integrating Discrete and Continuous Data in an OpenGeospatial-Compliant Specification

The integrated management of heterogeneous spatial data, such as continuous fields and discrete data, is an important issue for the Geographic Information (GI) community. Indeed, GI users are forced to navigate among and operate with several tools in order to solve their spatial problems, due to the lack of systems capable of integrating different components, each meant to provide a specific solution. The aim of this article is to propose an OpenGeospatial-compliant solution which supports expert users in handling problems involving heterogeneous data by means of a seamless approach. A class hierarchy modeling spatial discrete objects, continuous data, relationships, and operations, is described, whereby data are organized in agreement with the binary representation. A running example is illustrated to support readers’ understanding of the proposed solution. Finally, some guidelines about an implementation modality are given, to demonstrate the applicability of the proposal to an existing DBMS.