Whats in a GIS Database Design?
GIS has the ability to organize information into a series of layers that can be integrated using geographic location. At a fundamental level, each GIS database includes the series of thematic layers used to represent and answer questions about a particular problem set such as hydrology, tax parcel management, transportation, etc. For each theme, specifications for the contents in the physical database are also described. These include how the geographic features are to be represented (e.g., point, line, polygon, raster), how the data is organized (into feature classes, attributes, relationships, etc.), and what are the database integrity rules and GIS behaviors (e.g., topologies and network definitions). At the simplest level, a specific geodatabase design will include a specification for a number of feature classes, raster data sets, and other tables plus a series of relationships among the tables. Each feature class is managed as a simple table. Feature data sets contain a set of fea
