Extending a deductive object-oriented database system with spatial data handling facilities

This paper describes the integration of a spatial data-handling component w ith the ROCK & ROLL deductive object-oriented database system. The extended ROCK & ROLL system provides much more comprehensive and better integrated database programming facilities than other candidate platforms for spatial information systems. The extended system serves developers with an intuitiv e, expressive, formally defined collection of spatial data types as primiti ve types whose operations have state-of-the-art computational complexity. T he integration of these types with the object-oriented modelling, imperativ e programming and deductive querying facilities of ROCK & ROLL makes availa ble a comprehensive and integrated suite of complementary mechanisms for th e development of spatial information systems. The paper also provides preli minary benchmark results which indicate that kernel-support for spatial dat a handling does yield performance gains and that the extended ROCK & ROLL s ystem compares well with a specialist geographic information system and two widely known extensible database systems when the latter are extended with spatial data handling facilities. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All right s reserved.