Gis versioning management-The approach of the survey of israel

In the last two decades, there has been considerable progress in mapping and spatial data collection and today many developed countries are completely mapped. The three main challenges for National Mapping Agencies in these countries are: • How to effectively update and revise these databases with new information about our rapidly changing environment • How to integrate these geospatial data in the national databases utilizing standard relationships for data interchange • How to manage the history of changes and to manage past versions of datasets The following report describes the new approach of the Survey of Israel (SOI) for spatial data consolidation and for map revision. This approach is based on a unique spatial identifier given for every spatial feature in the database. The properties and maintenance of this identifier will be discussed along with various options that were investigated. Using this unique identifier SOI developed an algorithm to create Add, Delete and Update tables. These tables present an efficient method to store and distribute revisions and updates of the national spatial database to various organizations. The approach also allows for efficient documentation of past changes and the maintenance of historical spatial data thus creating a spatial-temporal framework for databases that includes a time-stamp versioning options. The significance of this approach to the Israeli National Spatial Data Infrastructure will be assessed using examples and a case study.