Ale Raza, 2000. Object-Oriented Temporal GIS for Urban Applications. PhD Dissertation. INF, University of Twente, The Netherlands. Where to get data for urban planning and management is one issue, but how then to manage this data is still a challenging task. This research focuses mainly on the latter (technical issue). The key data needed for urban planning and management is spatio-temporal (ST) parcel and land use data, which if updated regularly, raises the issue of structuring, storing, querying and displaying this data. Modeling, querying and displaying changes in land use and associated data has been a challenging task for many designers and urban planners. A number of issues have been identified by many researchers in the development of a TGIS. One of the fundamental issues in designing a generic TGIS is the spatio-temporal data model. Integrating time in object-based data models increases the complexity of the data structure. This thesis mainly addresses two issues, i.e., the development of an object-based spatio-temporal data model and the modeling of parcel and urban land use changes. To solve these issues, a novel approach has been adopted and a simple data structure is presented. This approach is based on objectoriented (OO) concepts and the mathematical theory of cell complexes in order to distil the complexity. The mathematical concept of cell complexes has been extended to temporal cell complexes in order to provide a sound basis for defining space and time. This may provide an unambiguous definition of the data model for implementation and a basis for further development of a spatio-temporal query language. This temporal cell complex (TCC) is the extension of ST-simplicial complexes. The cell tuple structure has been extended to temporal cell tuple (TCT) structure. This TCC is called ‘a unified cell tuple-based spatio-temporal data model’ (CTSTDM). The CTSTDM preserves the topology of spatio-temporal objects in an implicit manner. This approach has an advantage as the topology of an object may change without any change in the object itself.
