ABSTRACT
This chapter considers some emerging research topics related to geographical information sciences. The development of knowledge discovery in databases has emerged from research carried out in the areas of database systems, artificial intelligence, machine learning, statistics and geographic visualization. One particular mining task is relevant to designing space-time paths for a knowledge domain–extracting classes from target data. Geographic visualisation involves much more than just enabling users to ‘see’ spatio-temporal data. Users must be able to visualise the data and focus on what is relevant. The Open GIS consortium (OGIS) is an independent body with members from academia and industry that has as its main objective the standardisation of system specification, modelling and implementation of interoperable geographic information systems. The overall architecture of OGIS is based on an object-oriented implementation of existing distributed computing systems. Everything in OGIS is an object.
