This book offers researchers in academia and industry an excellent overview of the state-of-the-art in modeling and management of spatial data in distributed environments. It may also be the basis of specialized courses on Web-based geographical information systems. Spatial data is essential in a wide range of application domains today. While geographical applications remain the key target area, spatial properties are required in other contexts such as computer-aided design, robotics and image processing. Associated with these is the constantly growing number of distributed processing architectures, based on, for example, grid systems, sensor data networks, and personalized smart devices. This book links these two research streams, focusing on the modeling and management of spatial data in distributed systems.