This highly visual guide to creating a dynamic geographic data model helps ArcGIS users design schemas that have comprehensive and descriptive query definitions, user-friendly cartographic displays, and increased performance standards. "Designing Geodatabases" outlines five steps for taking a data model through its conceptual, logical, and physical phases - modeling the user's view, defining objects and relationships, selecting geographic representations, matching geodatabase elements, and organizing the geodatabase structure. Several design models for a variety of applications are considered, including addresses and locations, census units and boundaries, stream and river networks, and topography and the basemap.