Geospatial database engineering is the professional suite of activities that is needed to
develop, realize and maintain a usually large database system that holds geospatial data
sources that service usually a sizeable user community.
Wherever large geospatial datasets, especially comprising vector data, are shared between
professional users the technology to apply is a geospatially enabled database management
system (sdbms). Its purpose is to serve as a reliable data store for its community of users,
and provide a resource of agreed upon and documented quality.
This course teaches how to initiate such a database system, bring in external data, curate
the data, and put in place guards against data incorrectness, invalidity, incompleteness
and inconsistency.
It next addresses how conceptual descriptions of functions that must become part of the
system's application programming interface can be implemented using the programming
facilities that the sdbms offers. We look into the coding paradigm of set-based
programming, and make use of mathematical logic and comprehension schemes, which are
typical of SQL.
Specific attention will be paid in this course to computing with geospatial vector data.
This also requires understanding of the OGC Simple Feature model, ISO 19125. Various
techniques will be introduced to test and validate, correct and improve vector data, and
we discuss a number of typical problem situations and template solutions to them.
The course will bring to the student understanding of how to approach these challenges and
skills to resolve them.