A precategorical spatial-data metamodel

Increasing recognition of the extent and speed of habitat fragmentation and loss, particularly in the urban fringe, is driving the need to analyze qualitatively and quantitatively regional landscape structure for decision support in land-use planning and environmental-policy implementation. The spatial analysis required in this area is not well served by existing spatial-data models. In this paper a new theoretical spatial-data metamodel is introduced as a tool for addressing such needs and a new formalism is presented for spatial-data models on the basis of ideas from mathematical graph theory and category theory. Additionally, this formalism is used to describe a specific spatial-data model useful within the problem domain of decision support for socioecological systems. This model explicitly includes the notion of graph duality.