Submission: you can submit the final paper by hardcopy in class or by sending it to me as an email.

Select a topic related to our class that you are interested in and find recent research material on that topic (on the order of 20 pages, the length of two standard length conference papers or a longer journal paper). Read the paper(s) and write up an exposition of the the topic/issue based on standard resources (like the books we have used in class and some of the encyclopedia resources below) and present the solutions/discussions offered by the research paper. The papers can be survey papers, they do not have to be technical, but they should not be older than 2000.  Your paper should be between 5-7 pages double-spaced.

Some possible topic areas

Here are some areas in which you can start looking for topics; these are too broad to be paper topics by themselves, they should just serve as orientation guides. The list below includes areas we did not cover in class in case you want to be adventurous.

• Spatial data formats and standards
• Representation of 3-Dimensional Data
• Temporal data
• Commercial SDMS software
• SQL and query optimization
• constraint databases and GIS
• computational geometry and spatial data structures
• fuzzy spatial information
• Maps
  

Optional: I suggest you hand in your choice of topic and bibliography by 5/26, so I can make sure that what you are attempting is reasonable. For example, if I were planning to report on the original art gallery theorems (which is out of scope, since those results are from the 70s), I'd suggest the following:

Topic:  I'm planning to explain Fisk's simplified proof of Chvatal's art gallery theorem and discuss algorithmic aspects of the problem and visibility algorithms. For reference I'll be using Fisk's paper (A short proof of Chvátal's watchman theorem, J. Combin. Theory Ser. B 24 (1978), no. 3, page 374), and chapter 8 of O'Rourke's book Art Gallery Theorems and Algorithms, Oxford University Press, 1987, pages 202-227.

Good places to start browsing:

• International Symposium on Spatial and Temporal Databases, conference on spatial and temporal database systems
• Workshop on Advances in Geographic Information Systems, workshop on GIS
• Geospatial Information & Technology Association, organizes a yearly conference on geospatial applications
• GeoInformatica, journal on topics at the boundary of geography and computer science
• International Journal of Geographic Information Systems
• SpatialDB Advisor, several blogs on GIS/spatial database issues by spatial database programmer

Through the links above you can see the papers and get abstracts; to get the actual papers you need to be logged in through a DePaul computer, or go through the library's web-page to access the proceedings directly). However, many of these papers will also be available at the author's web-pages, so a web-search might get you the papers faster.

• Encyclopedia of GIS, dictionary style entries for many aspects of GIS with pointers to literature
• Spatial Databases, comprehensive collection of surveys on many aspects of spatial database systems with extensive bibliographies
• Handbook of Discrete and Computational Geometry, comprehensive survey of topics in computational geometry; for us the second half of the book is more interesting.