Extending a Deductive Object-Oriented Database System With Spatial Data . . .

This paper describes the integration of a spatial data handling component with the ROCK& ROLL deductive object-oriented database system. The extended ROCK & ROLL system provides much more comprehensive and better integrated database programming facilities than other candidate platforms for spatial information systems. The extended system serves developers with an intuitive, expressive, formally defined collection of spatial data types as primitive types whose operations have state-of-the-art computational complexity. The integration of these types with the object-oriented modelling, imperative programming and deductive querying facilities of ROCK & ROLL makes available a comprehensive and integrated suite of complementary mechanisms for the development of spatial information systems. The paper also provides preliminary benchmark results which indicate that kernel-support for spatial data handling does yield performance gains and that the extended ROCK & ROLL system compares well with a specialist geographic information system and two widely-known extensible database systems when the latter are extended with spatial data handling facilities