In Chapter 2, several other relational database systems will be reviewed. The primary goal of each analysis will be to identify the logical and physical approaches to data representation, as well as the user interface. Chapters 3 and 4 identify the physical and logical structure of the experimental disk-resident spatial information system developed for this project. As will be seen, this experimental system combines features of existing relational databases with new approaches to represent and manipulate information in a database. The Query Language Interpreter will be presented in Chapter 5. Through the interpreter, a database user can issue a variety of commands to perform database operations, as well as create sophisticated program control structures. Chapters 6-8 discuss the security, integrity, and recovery aspects of the disk-resident system. During the development of this project, various implementation problems were encountered. These problems and solutions are presented in Chapter 9. Chapter 10 discusses the performance of the disk-resident system. Statistics are presented comparing how the database commands performed when run under a variety of test environments. Chapter 11 uses the results from earlier chapters to draw conclusions concerning the disk-resident system and presents some directions for future work. Following the bibliography are related appendices that illustrate the various types of files recognized by the query language interpreter. / Master of Science