SQL, Space, and Time

We in the natural resource management community are ever more frequently building data systems that need to answer questions that explicitly incorporate time and/or space. Questions such as "how has this place changed over the last XX years", or "where on the landscape do we find these combination of things". SQL is an open standard, albeit with somewhat unique vendor implementations, that provides access to data stored in databases. Are there efforts underway to incorporate standard spatial and temporal data types and operators in SQL? From my perspective as a "consumer" of data for analytical purposed, I see little or no progress in this area. What I do see is strong vendor lock down in the spatial arena with ESRI (earth systems resources institute) dominating the market with proprietary data formats and APIs and no standards emerging for temporal data and operators. The major RDBMS vendors each seem to have proprietary extensions to their DBMS systems for spatial data. Is my perception and accurate reflection of the SQL standard as it exists now and as it is evolving? I worry that much of the data and information collected by public land management agencies will be accessible only with vendor-specific software.

Thanks,

Brad Received on Thu Jan 18 2001 - 17:51:29 CET