How to tackle 2-D and 3-D space in data ? lets say you are working on a power grid problem. You need to represent Towers; transmission lines; transformers and every thing else in a 2-D space. How would you design a Data Model for this 2-D space ? I can use a class tower  {int x_cor;int y_cor;string power_properties}But how to represent the ... say map of the power grid itself ?is there some standard solution to this ? some logical template people follow here ?i want to be able to slice this map by shape or area etc; i should be able to compose small maps to make  a large one ..  So what is the solution here ??By the way i am not working on a power-grid project (LOL) so please keep answers generic ..P.S. non-noobs please help me make the question better.
how to create a data model for the following problem
design;data;model;modelling
I do a lot of work with Geographic Information Systems (GIS).  Part of working in this domain requires handling and storing all sorts of spatial data, which we usually leave up to software vendors like ESRI or use open source solutions like GDAL.  GDAL can also be plugged into C++ and python programs easily.There are also several spatial databases out there like Oracle Spatial, Postgis, and Sql Server Spatial which will handle storage of this data as well as processing of it (find me all transmission towers that are inside of this area) through an extension of SQL syntax.  These spatial databases tend to implement several operations that you would normally find in a computational geometry book.GIS systems like ArcGIS and qGIS also provide the ability to create and print visual maps and save maps from your data as part of the solution.  In short I'm advocating against reinventing the wheel and borrowing functionality from these well tested solutions to spatial decision problems.