Spatial QBE Interface for Web GIS

摘要

Many applications use geographic data, such as land management, urban planning, tourism, vehicle guidance and navigation, and e-commerce. A related research problem is to define user-friendly interfaces for Web GIS. There is a need for the definition of simple and user-friendly interfaces to allow the users to pose ad-hoc queries. Query-By-Example (QBE) is a user-friendly language developed for a RDBMS. However, many RDBMS have included support for spatial extensions in SQL. QBE has not been extended in line with these extensions. In this paper, we make an effort to create extensions for QBE to support spatial queries and thus calling it Spatial QBE. We show that Spatial QBE is a simple and user-friendly interface for Web users. It can cater to both spatial and common database queries. The main strengths of this interface are its simplicity to express a query and its expressive power.