ABSTRACT
To carry out their assignments, these institutions (e.g. governmental agencies, departments of public works, environmental agencies, public utilities such as electricity, gas and water, private companies with a national remit, etc.) clearly need updates from the producer, in order to have the most faithful and realistic image of geographic reality. But these updates must allow for the preservation of consistency of all the knowledge added in the systems by users. Producers (e.g. national mapping agencies) may have similar preoccupations if they want to propagate the updates from their reference data sets to their derived products (e.g. cartographic products or other databases with different scales) in order to reduce the production costs. However, at the present time, such a propagation of the effects of spatio-temporal evolutions from a reference database to a user’s or a derived geographic database, may induce significant risks of information loss or leave the database in an inconsistent state. A taxonomy of the problems hindering the integration of the updates for geographic databases has already been presented and detailed in Badard (1998).
