This chapter is devoted to architectural and implementation aspects of spatiotemporal database management systems. It starts with a general introduction into architectures and commercial approaches to extending databases by spatiotemporal features. Thereafter, the prototype systems Concert, Secondo,

The management of time-dependent geometries, an important application of environmental sciences, is a challenge for the database community. On the one hand, the enormous growth of raw data caused by the introduction of the fourth dimension requires a maximally compact storage of changing objects. On the other hand

The data handling component of today's geographical information systems still only considers the management of two-dimensional data. However, in the geosciences as well as in commercial planning fields there is an increasing need to manage large amounts of 2.5D- and 3D-data. On the one hand, mobile telephony providers require digital landform data to maintain overall communication service networks. On the other hand, geoscientists and engineers need 3D surface and solid data to research dynamic processes. We are presenting new methods for the e#cient spatial access and the physical clustering of 3D geometries according to their topology. These methods enable acceptable performance for users, not only during the filter step of spatial queries but also during the refinement on exact geometries. The methods

The wide-spread use of GOCAD [Mal92a, GC99] in the geosciences as an application for 3D-modeling makes it a significant tool for an open 3D-GIS environment. Therefore GOCAD should provide an open interface for an object-oriented