This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Fifth International Symposium on Spatial Databases, SSD '97, held in Berlin, Germany, in July 1997.
The 18 revised full papers presented were carefully selected from a total of 55 submissions. Also included are two keynote contributions. The papers are organized in topical sections on spatial similarities, geo-algorithms, spatial constraint databases, spatial query processing, systems, spatial data models and spatial access methods.

Geographical Information Systems are becoming increasingly important to geologists, geographers, and urban and environmental planners, amongst others. Although there is an increasing number of such systems available on the market, many questions of a theoretical nature need to be addressed, because of the inherently large amounts of data and the lack of appropriate models and languages. Also, there is a need for flexible and efficient usage of GIS, thus permitting their application in a broad range of new areas, such as navigation systems for transport and the automotive industry. ESPRIT...