Towards 4-dimensional Geographic Information Systems

To overcome the limitation that traditional GISs lose much information for the real world, 4-dimensional GIS has the additional reference systems including object's height and temporal dimension. This paper describes the 4-dimensional geometric object model and components. The prototype for 4-dimensional GIS consists of the data provider, manager, and renderer components. We show the virtual city that its database contains topographic maps, buildings, roads and temporal history data. This provides spatial, temporal operations and analysis functions.