This article presents a complete spatio-temporal object DBMS called Tripod, in the context of an application to support the management of previously developed land (PDL). In particular the article focuses on: the techniques that are available to realise the application data model; the facilities necessary to realise the operational semantics of updates, and the facilities that are available to identify interesting patterns of spatio-temporal change. Whilst there exist other proposals for data models and query languages for spatio-temporal object databases, Tripod is unique in that it provides: a complete implementation of an expressive spatio-temporal data model to allow modelling of (a)spatial time-varying data; the first example of an implementation of language bindings to support manipulation of stored data; and the first complete implementation of a spatio-temporal OQL that we know of. The article also focuses on the benefits arising from use of a spatio-temporal DBMS on an important category of application, namely land parcel management.