A Survey: Knowledge Discovery in Spatial Databases

Knowledge discovery in databases is a complex process concerned with the discovery of relationships and other descriptions from data. Knowledge discovery in spatial databases represents a particular case of discovery, allowing the discovery of relationships that exist between spatial and non-spatial data, and other data characteristics that aren’t explicitly stored in spatial databases. This paper describes the conception and implementation of PADRAO, a system for knowledge discovery in spatial databases. PADRAO presents a new approach to this process, which is based on qualitative spatial reasoning. The spatial semantic knowledge and the principles of qualitative spatial reasoning needed for the spatial reasoning process are available in the PADRAO’s geographic database and PADRAO’s spatial knowledge base, allowing the integration of the geo-spatial component, associated with the analyzed non-geographic data, in the process of knowledge discovery. This paper presented the PADRAO system, a system for knowledge discovery in spatial databases based on qualitative spatial reasoning. PADRAO represents a new approach to this particular case of knowledge discovery, in which the positional aspects of geographic data are provided by a spatial reference, gave by a geographic identifier (in the described case, the municipalities’ name). The PADRAO’s geographic database and spatial knowledge base store the spatial semantic Knowledge and the qualitative spatial reasoning principles needed for the inference of new spatial relations required in the knowledge discovery process.