ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a historical background to object-oriented data management, illustrating the diverse efforts involved in object-oriented methods, temporal databases and version management approaches. It explains the main concepts in the object-oriented paradigm that are essential for developing a spatio-temporal data model. The history of object orientation starts in the early 1960s with the efforts of O. J. Dahl, B. Myrhaug and K. Nygaard in creating and implementing new concepts for programming discrete simulation applications. Several object-oriented programming languages have been developed, most of them having their conceptual foundations based on Smalltalk. A class is a set of objects that share common properties. A single object is simply an instance of a class. Several applications in GIS require information on the state of an object when it has been modified in the database to match its change in the real world.
