Geospatial Modeling

Are there any resources I can reference for modeling geospatial data?

In our particular case, we are modeling a pipeline as the basic "fact" where the geographic location is of particular importance. In addition we need to model the location of attributes of the pipe (size, material, etc.) as well as location of such items as valves, tees, others. We also need to know attributes of the pipe surroundings: which state, city, does it go through; what is the land use (farm, forest, town); does it run through protected areas (specific ecology as defined by government land use); plus others.

Note that some "dimensionsal information" will apply to a specific point on the pipe where others will specifiy a length of pipe that is affected.

As implied above, our initial thoughts are to have a factless fact table which would basically consist of points (with geographic attributes). At each point we would key to dimensional attributes containing that point.

Any thoughts or references to this type of modeling would be most welcome.

Thank you.