ABSTRACT
Looking ahead to the requirements of the next generation of geographical information systems (GIS), one of the extensions identified is the integration of multimedia data such as video, image, audio and unstructured text. At present, these media types are not provided as standard built-in data types; rather, the representation and manipulation are left to the application. This chapter discusses the issues involved in the provision of a suitable conceptual model to encompass all the multimedia types that currently exist, and describes an object-oriented architecture to provide support for the management and querying of multimedia information in GIS.
