Propagating Updates between GIS Databases: Operations and Implementations

Data updating is a significant stage in the life of a geographical information system (GIS). When geodata producers have finished updating their own geographical information database, the updates in it should be timely propagated into the users' databases to enable them to have the most realistic image of geographic reality. However, updates propagation is usually a very time-taking and error-prone process at present, since the operations involved in it have not been systematically analyzed and the software tools used in common can not provide all implementing modules of these operations. For designing a typical tool to facilitate updates propagation, this paper presents a survey of implementing approaches to operations during updates propagation, such as schema matching, updates extraction, entity identification, updates integration, consistency maintenance, and so on.