Smart Spatial Database System for Multi-Purpose Planning: The Case Study of Hail City

摘要

The City of Hail is one of the ancient cities in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia; just more recently City of Hail experience a dramatic change in urban growth to become a world city class, a number of development’s projects now are under construction at both infrastructure and urban services; these fast development of the city attracted peoples to migrate from rustic area to stay in Hail, these migration possess the planners to provide adequate urban services and better management of the city. An excellent management of the city and urban development to fulfill the people’s requirements in Hail City depend on the timeous analysis of urban planning data. The analysis and process of urban data face a number of problems, in particular relating to the storage and integrative processing of large spatial and non-spatial datasets from various sources and different formats, data types, and multi-dimensional locations. These problems complicate database structure and design, algorithm operations, relationships, and require data types that joined the spatial and non-spatial in seamless manor, providing ad hoc queries, and as well as offering a practical visualization of the urbandata. The current database system used by planners in the City of Hail is characterized by limited data types, isolated spatial and non-spatial data, and a lack of ad hoc queries. Thus, it is limited in managing complex applications and queries, combining various objects, and providing sufficient information. The system omits one of the most important steps in creation and implementation of an effective database, namely the schema design. A database design schema should be preceded by determination of user requirements. The proposed system is expected to provide a number of tools for data storage, analysis of spatial and non-spatial datasets with visualization representation adequate enough to support decision making in urban planning and development.