Spatial Objects Management Method for Geodatabases

Abstract

Integrating geo-spatial datasets through merging, sometimes layers are unable to perfectly-overlay each other. In most cases, the cause of misalignment is the cartographic variation of objects forming features in the datasets. Either this could be due to actual changes on ground, collection, or storage approaches used leading to overlapping or openings between objects. This chapter presents an alignment method that uses updating and adjustment algorithms to manipulate the geometry of objects that form features within a dataset or complementary adjacent datasets in geodatabases so that they can align to achieve perfect integration. The method identifies every unique spatial instance in datasets and their spatial points that define all their geometry, the differences are compared and used to compute the alignment parameters. The method was tested by coding algorithms in MatLab for each required function. The point-to-point primitive correspondence between datasets help to avoid several iterations during alignment while maintaining topology and attributes. The method was able update, adjust and align objects in 14 datasets that were chosen due to their geometrical type, composition, characteristics, errors, precision, and attributes variation as per requirements. This provides a uniform geo-spatial features’ alignment that minimizes geometrical errors by taking into consideration changes in the different datasets being integrated without affecting the topology and attributes. This will facilitate setting up spatial data infrastructures and lead to more use of spatial information in decision-making. The method is recommended for updating the many geodatabases that have remained static because of technical difficulties in handling varying features.