Pro Oracle Spatial

With growing reliance on spatial components for making critical and strategic decisions, there is great incentive to maximize the added value of spatial data. Enter: Pro Oracle Spatial. This highly anticipated book examines the potential for organizations to exploit spatial information by way of Oracle Spatial.

Included are case studies of advanced spatial applications in healthcare, telecom, retail, and distribution industries. Further, the content is based on extensive feedback from training courses, discussion lists, and customers. This talented author team will also suggest best-practice approaches to common problems.

The Advanced Spatial Engine has several subcomponents that cater to the complex analysis and manipulation of spatial data that is required in traditional GIS applications. Internally, each of these additional components uses the underlying geometry data type and index and geometry engine functionality.

The Network Data Model provides a data model for storing networks inside the Oracle database. Network elements (links and nodes) can be associated with costs and limits, for example, to model speed limits for road segments. Other functionality includes computation of the shortest path between two locations given a network of road segments, finding the N nearest nodes, and so on. The network data model is useful in routing applications. Typical routing applications include web services such as MapQuest and Yahoo! Maps, or navigation applications for roaming users using GPS technology. We cover more details about this component in Chapter 10.

The Linear Referencing System (LRS) facilitates the translation of mile-markers on a highway (or any other linear feature) to geographic coordinate space and vice versa. This component allows users to address different segments of a linear geometry, such as a highway, without actually referring to the coordinates of the segment. This functionality is useful in transportation and utility applications, such as gas pipeline management.

The Spatial Analysis and Mining Engine provides basic functionality for combining demographic and spatial analysis. This functionality is useful in identifying prospective sites for starting new stores based on customer density and income. These tools can also be used to materialize the influence of the neighborhood, which in turn can be used in improving the efficacy and predictive power of the Oracle Data Mining Engine.

GeoRaster facilitates the storage and retrieval of georeferenced images using their spatial footprints and the associated metadata. GeoRaster defines a new data type for storing raster images of geographically referenced objects. This functionality is useful in the management of satellite imagery.

The Topology Data Model supports detailed analysis and manipulation of spatial geometry data using finer topological elements such as nodes and edges. In some land-management applications, geometries share boundaries, as in the case of a property boundary and the road on which the property is situated. Oracle Spatial defines a new data type to represent topological elements (such as the shared “road segment”) that can be shared between different spatial objects. Updates to shared elements implicitly define updates to the sharing geometry objects. In general, this component allows for the editing and manipulation of nodes and edges without disturbing the topological semantics of the application.

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