FOR THE DEGREE OF

iAcknowledgements I wish to thank several people who, in some way, have helped me during the develop-ment of this thesis. First, I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisor, Prof. Shashi Shekhar for his continued encouragement and invaluable suggestions during this study. It has been a great pleasure to do research with him. I would like to thank members of my advisory committee Professors Jaideep Srivastava, Arindam Banerjee, and Sudipto Banerjee for their guidance and constructive and useful comments. This research also benefited from discussions with Prof. Daniel Boley. I sincerely would like to thank to US Army Corps of Engineers, Topographic Engi-neering Center Researchers James P. Rogers and Dr. James A. Shine with whom I have collaborated during my PhD research. Their conceptual and technical insights into my thesis work have been invaluable. I am very grateful to the all members of Spatial Databases and Data Mining group members at the Department of Computer Science for their discussions, critiques, and con