13.1. Introduction

The Geospatial Information Data Base (GIDB) System is an object-oriented (OO) digital-mapping database system designed by the Digital Mapping, Charting and Geodesy Analysis Program (DMAP) of the Naval Research Laboratory. Development of the GIDB System began in 1994 to demonstrate that representation of spatial data is less cumbersome and more optimal in object format versus relational format. Smalltalk was chosen as the programming language for the database, since at that time it was the most robust pure OO language available. Initially, all management of spatial objects was done in memory. As development grew to the point where memory management was no longer feasible, first ObjectStore and later GemStone was chosen as the ...

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