ABSTRACT
Many geographic data sets existing worldwide reflect the diversity in how we perceive and model the world around us (Mustière & van Smaalen 2007). These data sets have different levels of detail (e.g. individual buildings vs. building blocks) or thematic contents (e.g. roads modelled as topographic objects with name and road class vs. roads modelled with rich traffic information in a navigation data set). A Multi-representation-database (MRDB) is a spatial database used to integrate and store data of different type, scale, thematic granularity, time, or accuracy, which relate to the same physical object or phenomenon. This includes data stemming from different applications and origin, as well as data presenting and symbolizing the spatial phenomena differently. Also, data of different types can be integrated, e.g. raster and vector data (Butenuth et al. 2007), as well as 3-D data, surface data and multimedia information like video or clips. In the MRDB, the connections between individual objects in the different representations are explicitly stored.
