Introduction to Geoinformatics

Course participants will learn the basic concepts related to the definition of the IT subdiscipline geoinformatics along with related concepts such as geomatics and geoinformation.
They will also get acquainted with the structures of spatial data in relational database systems as well as in Geographic Information System - GIS systems. They will learn how to use GIS systems in the field of spatial data analysis and learn how to build SQL queries using functions and procedures for queries to spatial data.
The aim of the course is to teach students to work on their own collection of spatial data in order to build their own real-life Spatialite database along with the implementation of selected spatial analyzes in the QGIS software, with particular emphasis on the construction and analysis of topological data.

Spatial data stored in files

There are a large number of spatial data formats. Initially, one feature object class was saved in the w directory as a set of approximately 20 files. Then the number of files was reduced to several and the object class was stored in 4 files. Then, the introduction of hybrid spatial object saving. Vector files contained geometry and relational databases attributes of objects.

Spatial data in relational database systems

The storage of spatial data in relational databases started with the new BLOB and SDO_Geometry data types. Such data storage enables the integration of spatial data with descriptive data

Open Source Solutions
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WKB is the key structure of the BLOB data type that stores the geometry of the vectors data in the database. It is used in Spatilite, PostgreSQL and other databases.

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Comercial Solutions
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Programs such as ArcGIS or Geomedia also use the BLOB data type to store data, but the data structure is closed and unpublished. Oracle created the type SDO_Gemoetry, which has been publicly available to read and write methods.

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