This paper describes a method of compressing information on geographic phenomena present in a digital map and its correct interpretation in any other digital map. A geographic phenomena is referred to by an almost fixed length code regardless of its geometric representation. All components of the location reference code refer to real world information. Unlike existing approaches, it provides a mechanism for communicating information between map databases of different origins, specifications and level of detail without the need for processing and maintaining large pre-coded location databases. Utilization of an object-oriented approach limits pre-processing to the definition of a suitable data model. Spatial Object Tags (SPOT) are based on a natural classification of geographic phenomena. Interpretation of a SPOT code utilizes a sort of "divide and conquer" technique for fast results. SPOTs are small, compact packets, describing a geographic phenomena allowing a receiver to unambiguously interpret its content and refer to the same geographic phenomena within its data set. (A*)
Samenvatting