“GEO-OUEL: a system for the manipulation and display of geographic data” by Berman and Stonebraker

This paper briefly summarizes the implementation of GEO-OUEL, a special purpose geographic information retrieval and display system. Basically, it is a rather small “front end” to a powerful general purpose relational data base system, INGRES, implemented at Berkeley. Also discussed are the problems that were discovered during the implementation of the original proposal (presented at the 1975 ACM SIGMOD/SIGGRAPH Workshop in Waterloo, Ontario) and the corrective steps taken. Lastly, experiments are described which indicate the performance penalty paid for this “front end” approach and the savings in development time realized.

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