SIT-IN: a Real-Life Spatio-Temporal Information System

摘要

The SIT-IN (acronym for Integrated Territorial Information System, in Italian) system integrates a historical database, providing information about the temporal evolution of territorial administrative partitions; the Institute's GIS, providing the cartography of the Italian territory down to the census tract level of detail; a statistical data warehouse, providing spatio-temporal data from a number of different surveys; and finally an address normalizing/geo-matching system, providing information about the limits of census tracts (e.g. portions of streets or the sides of town squares). SIT-IN has a three-layer/multi-tier architecture. Layer 3. The data level is composed of a few RDB instances. In particular, on top of the spatial database, the spatial data engine allows efficient access and manipulation of geographical data. Layer 2. This layer consists of various application servers, particularly: (i) a Java server, handling the communications to and from the databases; (ii) an Internet Map Server, allowing cartography serving on the Web; (iii) a Report Server, dynamically generating HTML pages of statistical tables. Layer 1. The system-user interaction is enabled by Java applets and "classical" HTTP calls for the dynamic generation of HTML pages.