One of the most publicized goals of modern computer society is to provide flexible access to information for everybody, anywhere, anytime. To make data management system s successful in satisfying user quest for information, an absolute requirement is the capability of tailoring the information to the peculiar needs of the targeted user. Unfortunately, this is a domain w here current technology fails to support adequate functionality. Existing approaches to such versatility rely on the idea that all possible view s of a piece of information can be derived from a single ultimate representation. This may work in a centralized setting, but it is definitely unlikely to provide a sufficient framework in distributed, interoperable environments.This paper presents a research and development project that intends to explore the issues related to representation and management of multiple representations of the same reality. A specific focus of the project is spatio-temporal information and the support of multi-scale geographic databases, where objects are represented at many different resolution levels.