Winner of the 2005 Ben Franklin Award for best Professional/Technical/ Computer book. Receiving a 10 out of 10 for use of illustrations, quality of writing, and information.

ESRI has been working with our GIS user community during the last several years to develop a set of “best practices” geodatabase designs for various application domains. These database designs are intended to help GIS users rapidly become productive with the geodatabase and to share “what really works” among our user and developer communities.

This book has two primary goals:
1. Providing a series of domain data models that represent commonly used GIS datasets by applying best practices for GIS data modeling and collection. These data models are intended to provide a series of templates for implementing geodatabases for specific solutions.
2. Communicating a practical GIS database design process. As a GIS professional, you will need to learn and apply practical GIS database design methods. Gaining GIS design skills will be important to your success in your job.

A series of designs derived from specific case studies are presented throughout the book, including:

• Streams and river networks
• Census units and boundaries
• Addresses and locations
• Parcels and the cadastre
• Federal lands survey
• Raster data use
• Cartography and the basemap

Building accurate geodatabases is the foundation for meaningful and reliable GIS. By documenting actual case studies of successful ArcGIS implementations, Designing Geodatabases makes it easier to envision your own database plan.

About the authors:

Dr. David K. Arctur is currently a Product Specialist at ESRI and has been a part of the geodatabase development team since Feb 2000. He received his BS and MS in Electrical Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, and his Ph.D. in Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Florida. Dr. Arctur has over 18 years of programming experience, including more than 6 years in object-oriented programming and 10 years in database application design and development, he has authored articles for International Journal of Geographical Information Science, IEEE Computer Magazine, and Earth Observation & Mapping Magazine.

Michael Zeiler is a technical writer and data model specialist at ESRI with 20 years of GIS experience diagramming GIS concepts, building data models, and programming. He has authored the best-selling books; Inside ARC/INFO, Modeling Our World, and Exploring ArcObjects.