OBJECT ORIENTATION IN A SPATIAL DECISION-SUPPORT SYSTEM FOR GRAZING LAND MANAGEMENT

An integrated knowledge-based spatial decision support system, Landass ess DSS, is being developed to assist with the sustainable management of Australia's northern grazing lands. The system incorporates a knowl edge base of management and ecological knowledge, a natural resource d atabase, a geographic information system, and scientific and economic models. The system requirements introduced the need for an integrating paradigm to facilitate the modeling of the natural resource system, k nowledge representation, representation of heterogeneous data, and the integration of system components. The ability to model real-world fea tures with corresponding knowledge base and software objects, which in clude structural and behavioral information, provides a powerful and i ntuitive method for representing and integrating knowledge and data, p rocess models, and spatial information, as well as encapsulating and a bstracting different levels of information and functionality.