Modeling Our World: The ESRI Guide to Geodatabase Design (Paperback)

~ (Author) "A geographic data model is a representation of the real world that can be used in a GIS to produce maps, perform interactive queries, and..." (more)
Key Phrases: geodatabase data access objects, annotation feature class, complex junction feature, United States, Geodatabase Feature, Visual Basic (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

This conceptual overview introduces and explains the concept of geodatabases-object-oriented data models-which are introduced in ArcInfo 8, the world's most advanced Geographic Information System (GIS) software package. Included are explanations of what models are and how they represent reality, how GIS data is structured in digital form, extending the power of databases, and making models of everything from streams to electrical power grids. Users will be able to make their datasets "smarter" by defining the relationships between them and endowing them with specific behaviors. These new characteristics are explained and highlighted with hundreds of map illustrations and diagrams.

About the Author

Michael Zieler is a designer for ESRI and the author of Inside ARC/INFO. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Product Details

• Paperback: 200 pages
• Publisher: ESRI Press; illustrated edition edition (January 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1879102625
• ISBN-13: 978-1879102620
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 7.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #330,168 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It is a reference., July 13, 2004

By A Customer

If you want to learn this much GIS terminology, you have to read hundereds of pages of ESRI's guide or reference books. This is an excellent reference in GIS literature that introduces hundereds of terms in a reasonable size and good price. The author went to the very corners of GIS-data-base structure. For any GIS-term you can find an illustration and explanation. The text is clearly written by an ArcInfo User that is some how "heavy". However,as an ArcGIS/ArcView user it was useful for me. The book title is somehow misleading at the first glance, but when you go inside, you can see no other title can fit this topic. BUY IT, if you want to know the GIS terminology to the extreme details, including backgrounds, comparative explanations and so on. DON'T BUY IT, if you want to do GIS modelling buy reading this book, as the text is mostly concentrates on data base.

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Zeiler knows GIS, May 29, 2000

By A Customer

This book works very well for people new to GIS as well as experienced users. The fundamentally important concepts to GIS are explained both generally as well as from within the perspective of the new ESRI ArcInfo 8 software. Difficult and new concepts such as versioning, geometric networks, and raster imagery are particularly well explained. The book is not a software user manual, but rather an explanation of the fundamental GIS concepts, particularly those important to the new Geodatabase.

The book is a veritable corucopia of colorful graphics, figures, and imagery. Many readers will be able to achieve an 80% understanding of the material merely by closely studying the figures and examples - kind of the National Geographic "read the captions" approach.

The text contains lots of class/component diagrams that give a very good overview of the underlaying Geodatabase software architecture. This is a book that I will use and refer back to on a frequent basis. Rock on!

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Nicely produced but disappointing content, June 6, 2003

By	Karen Nelson (Takoma Park, MD USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I am having a hard time imagining who this book would be useful for. If you are new to GIS, the explanations are pretty dry and contain a good deal of jargon, and there are absolutely NO examples or how-to's. You cannot read this book and expect to learn to do even the simplest operation in GIS. Moreover, without concrete examples, its hard to conceptualize how it all fits together. On the other hand, for someone like me, pretty familiar with basic GIS but wanting to get into more depth, it was too elementary and repetitive. For example, I can't count how many times the author says there are 3 basic kinds of data in a geodatabase... Except for the last 3 chapters (rasters, TINs and location finders) there was little I didn't already know, at least intuitively.

The book is very nicely produced, however. It gives the feel of Powerpoint slides plus the narrative you would hear if you went to an ESRI workshop. Literally every piece of information is explained both graphically and in the text. And of course as software books go, its not too expensive. However, you can get most of this information for free, from the extensive help files that come with ArcView -- plus examples and how-to-use-the-software instructions.

If you're just getting started with GIS, there are lots of getting-started books out there. If you need a lot of depth, try Zeiler's ArcObjects 2-volume set (yes, same author, but much more meaty).