Entity-relationship and object-oriented formalisms for modeling spatial environmental data

Entity-Relationship (ER) and Object-Oriented (OO) formalisms are often used to model environmental information of databases or computer programs. The majority of the environmental information is georeferenced. However, for 20 years, researchers have proposed different methods to adapt ER and OO to model spatial data. Spatial information is complex, and the goal is to simplify its representation in conceptual models. The goal of this paper is to propose a classification and a list of work in the area of ER and OO formalisms for spatial information. Numerous bibliographical references on the subject are also provided. The article targets mainly researchers working in the area of environment domain hoping to find a bibliographical entry to the subject. We present here a synthesis of the principal advances in the field.