Object Fusion in Geographic Information Systems

Overview: Object Fusion uses spatial location (latitude, longitude) as a global identifier for merging objects from two different geographic databases. The techniques used to determine if two different spatial locations can be considered equivalent are those typically used in the GIS field (for the same purpose). In essence these techniques can be classified as nearest-neighbour techniques in which different criteria (or thresholds) are used to determine if two locations are 'near' enough to be classified as the same location.

Algorithms:

• One-Sided Nearest-Neighbor Join
• Mutually-Nearest Method
• Probabilistic Method
• Normalized-Weights Method

Concerns:

• A precise spatial location is often unavailable in non-GIS dbs (i.e., usually only a general location such as a city name or region name is provided); as such, these algorithms will most likely only be useful in integrating strictly GIS dbs and not GIS and relational dbs.

-- AprilWebster - 21 Feb 2007