A spatio-temporal model for the manipulation of lineage metadata

Nowadays one of the most successful applications of GIS is the management of a land-use cadastre. A lot of corporate GIS databases are in development, they support the legal management and distribution of cadastral maps. However, the propagation of geographical updates toward cadastral databases is still a methodological and technical problem to address in the context of large applications with many different users. This paper proposes a model based on lineage metadata that supports the management of geographical changes in the context of a corporate cadastre application. Geographical and cadastral changes are identified from an analysis of the French cadastre which acts as a case study for the development of our model. The lineage metadata model is based on the application of a direct acyclic graph that permits the management of the evolution of geographical objects and the generation of historical queries. The proposed model is specified and validated with the O-2 object-oriented database management system.