A Research On Geodatabase-based Battlefield Environment Information Data Model

To win in an informationized war, two things should be taken into consideration: the first is to realize informationized armies, weapons and battlefield environments; and the second, to build an integrated digital battlefield only known to ourselves. This battlefield, from another point of view, can be seen as an information platform for battlefield environment, which affords to provide environment information for fighting, training and commanders' decisions.Then how to build such an information platform? The author points out that the key is to design and implement some data models, since all kinds of data got from battlefield environment information is an essential part of the battlefield environment building. So the author focuses on data models of this kind, trying to make them more available for GIS and for battlefield environmental database.Compared with several other data models used in early and recent GIS, the author gives his own idea of what is a geographical space, and then puts forward a new object-oriented conceptual data model. This data model is constituted by three kinds of models, i.e. Geometric Object Model, Geographical Feature Model, and Graphical Representation Object Model. These three models come from different cognitive levels, and hence provide different levels of views for using, operating and developing GIS. This, in turn, will be bound to provide a good framework for building an integrated BEIS.As for how to build these battlefield environment data models, the author brings " forward a new method, just to meet the need of military geographical information. The core of this method is to integrate Geodatabase data model in ArcGIS with object-oriented data model, so it may be called Geodatabase-based Battlefield Environment Information Data Model (BEIDM). The whole method can be separated into two steps: firstly, match BEIDM with corresponding Geodatabase data model; and secondly, organize all data and put them into the geographical feature dataset, that is, put all feature classes and dataset into Geodatabase.