A geographic information system framework for transportation data sharing

This paper develops a framework and principles for sharing transportation data. The framework is intended to clarify roles among participants, data producers, data integrators, and data users. The principles are intended to provide guidance for the participants. Both the framework and the principles are based on an enterprise geographic information systems-transportation (GIS-T) data model that defines relations among transportation data elements. The data model guards against ambiguities and provides a basis for the development of the framework and principles for sharing transportation data. There are two central principles. First is the uncoupling of graphics, topology, position, and characteristics. Second is the establishment of a schema for transportation features and their identifiers. An underlying principle is the need for a common data model that holds transportation features, not their graphical representations, as the objects of interest. Attributes of transportation features are represented as linear and point events. These are located along the feature using linear referencing. Sharing of transportation data involves exchange of relevant transportation features and events, not links and nodes of application-specific databases. Strategies for sharing transportation features follow from this approach. The key strategy is to identify features in the database to facilitate a transactional update system, one that does not require rebuilding the entire database anew. This feature-oriented enterprise GIS-T database becomes the basis for building separate application-specific network databases.