Working Group to be involved in. Major 
technical and scientific activities of the 
past year include: 
Examination of a number of different 
techniques for modeling spatial data, i.e., 
DIGEST, SAIF, ARC/INFO/VPF, SDTS, 
etc. Work will continue in this direction 
to develop a comparative study document 
of the different models of vector spatial 
data. 
In March of 1993, presentation of a paper 
at the Fifth Canadian Conference on GIS, 
entitled "Development of a framework for 
interoperability of a spatial database”. A 
follow-up paper will be presented at the 
upcoming ISPRS Commission II 
Symposium in Ottawa, Canada 
Working Group 1I/3 held a business 
meeting during the Fifth Canadian 
Conference on GIS, held in Ottawa, 
Canada from March 27 - 29, 1993. 
The Working Group also organized and 
conducted a workshop prior to the 
opening of the Fifth Canadian Conference 
on GIS. The half day workshop on Object 
Oriented Spatial Databases was held on 
March 20, 1993, providing presentations 
and demonstrations. 
Working Group II/3 held a business 
meeting at the Symposium of Spatial Data 
Handling, held in Singapore, during 
August of 1993. Among a number of 
items, WG members discussed the current 
issues of handling large volumes of 
spatial data and made plans for the 
Commission II Symposium in Ottawa 
from June 6 - 10, 1994. 
A discussion meeting on methods of 
accessing Global Directories on 
Geophysical Data-sets, was held in 
September, 1993 in Ottawa, Canada. 
522 
Catalogue Interoperability Workshop, 
April 1993 
State of Science and Technology 
Working Group II/3 
The technology for the maintenance and 
processing large volume of spatial data 
continues to be a challenging problem in 
computing sciences and systems 
engineering. These problems are not 
restricted to spatial data alone, but span 
all areas where a high volume of data is 
captured and requires processing. 
Current database technology are very 
limited in coping with the size of the data 
volumes being considered here. 
The problems are compounded by the fact 
that most spatial data resources are legacy 
data, they have a time dimension which is 
very essential to maintain for subsequent 
processing. The mere size of these 
datasets can not be handled by traditional 
database management systems, some 
records such as single images may span 
megabytes of disk space, and duplicating 
the data set for reliability purposes is very 
expensive. So far, the emergent 
technologies that have been used include: 
optical disk storage system, high density 
magnetic tapes and digital audio tapes, 
tape vaults and RAID technology and 
disk stripping techniques. These are 
technologies that although commercially 
available are still undergoing research. 
The primary focus of Working Group II/3 
is addressing these problems related to 
the storage and retrieval of very large 
spatial data and the technology for 
processing, and dissemination of large 
volumes of spatial information. In this 
regard, the Working Group's first year 
focused on identifying research projects, 
research centres and personnel around the 
world involved in various research 
activities related to the acquisition storage 
and processing of very large volume of 
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