International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, Vol XXXV, 
create or replace type TREE_TY as object ( 
position POSITION TY, 
species VARCHAR? (30), 
plantation date DATE, 
member function AGE (plantation date in DATE) 
return NUMBER, 
pragma restrict references (AGE, wnds)); 
The keyword pragma and its bounded clause is mandatory if the 
method AGE is to be used in queries as it says the AGE method 
will not modify the database (WNDS - write no database state). 
create or replace type body TREE TY as 
member function AGE (plantation date DATE) 
return NUMBER is 
begin 
return round (SysDate — plantation date); 
end; 
The following query executes the age method in the data type 
tree ty and returns the age of all tree objects in relation 
TREE, TAB. Values of components of an object (attributes and 
methods) are accessed with the dot notation. 
select tree id, t.tree. AGE (tree.plantation date) 
from TREE TABt; 
When using methods there is no need to store variable data - 
such as the age of planted trees for the purpose of rejuvenation 
outside the park's centre zone. Instead static data (such as the 
plantation date) can be accessed to derive variable data via 
functions and procedures. 
Object types can be mapped to the prevalent OO languages like 
C++ and Java. Thus object type instances in the database can be 
accessed and modified to and from C++ resp. Java applications 
(Lee, 2003). 
Type inheritance allows sharing similarities among data types 
as well as extending their chracteristics. With single type 
inheritance a type may extend (inherit from) one supertype. 
Such a type (called subtype) inherits all its supertype’s 
attributes and methods. A subtype may also add new attributes 
and methods and / or override inherited methods. 
The root type of a hierarchy must be declared to be not final: 
create or replace type TREE_TY as object ( 
position POSITION TY, 
species VARCHARQ2 (30), 
member function STOCK () return NUMBER) not final; 
A subtype can be created under a non final type. It inherits all 
attributes and methods from its supertype. It can add new 
attributes and methods and / or override inherited methods. 
create type CONIFER. TY under TREE TY ( 
status of damage VARCHAR (20), 
height NUMBER (4,2), 
member function AGE () return NUMBER, 
overriding member function STOCK () return NUMBER); 
^ Part B4. Istanbul 2004 
  
Tree 
  
position : position ty 
species : string 
  
stock() : number 
  
  
  
inheritance 
  
CONIFERS 
status of damage : string 
height : number 
  
  
age() : number 
stock() : number 
  
  
  
Figure 5. Type Inheritance 
Oracle Spatial and Oracle Locator, both core features of the 
Oracle database provide a natively supported open vector data 
type SDO_Geometry for storing vector data and a set of spatial 
operators and functions to perform spatial analysis inside the 
database. The following command retrieves the topological 
intersection of deadwood and stand features and writes the 
corresponding geometry into a new spatial table: 
insert into result_table (id, geom) 
select d.id, sdo_geom.sdo_intersection (d.geom, m.diminfo, 
s.geom, m.diminfo) 
from DEADWOOD d, STANDS s, user_sdo_geom_metadata m 
where m.table name like 'stands' 
and m.column name like 'geom' 
and d.id = 324 and s.id = 5141524252; 
In the meantime the SDO_Geometry data type has become a de 
facto industry standard that is supported by all major GIS 
vendors' products to push interoperability. R-tree and quadtree 
indexes can be used standalone or in conjunction. Each index 
type is appropriate for different situations, although R-tree 
indexing is often the best choice because of its capacity to 
operate directly against geodetic data (Geringer, 2003). 
In the current version Oracle database 10g native data types for 
storing raster and persistent topology data were added to further 
extend possibilities to model real world objects based on object- 
relational database structures. 
The completeness and therefore the quality of spatial features' 
descriptions can be further enhanced with the introduction of a 
new system-defined datatype XMLType that can be used as the 
datatype for columns in tables and views to create, extract, and 
index XML data. A feature’s position and spatial representation 
is then modeled by using vector resp. raster types, its 
characteristics are captured by (complex) attributes and any 
further information on the spatial object, that cannot be 
structured to be kept in the data types mentioned, is maintained 
in xml-documents, all stored natively within the database. 
For modeling highly dynamic changes of real world objects the 
SQL type TIMESTAMP can be used which is a high-precision 
time and date type that allows storing fractions of a second 
(Qian, 2004). The timestamp values are basically points on a 
linear time axis. 
For slower changes in state we can use DATE or create own 
adapted abstract data types that can express discrete dates or 
times intervals. The data types can be flexibly extended to meet 
an application's accurency requirements and provide attributes 
to express the fuzziness of a time record, for instance if a time 
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