Abstract: Updates propagation is the process of using updating information of the changed features in the new version of fundamental geographic database (FGDB) to perform updating operations such as revision, addition, deletion on the corresponding features and their relates data in client database (CDB) for keep it also having good currency. At present, updates propagation is often implemented manually, needs too much human-computer interaction and is time-taking, laborious and error-prone. In order to automatically and effectively propagate updates from FGDB to CDB, four basic operations necessary for updates propagation, schema matching, change extraction, entity identification and updates integration, are respectively discussed and analyzed aiming to its basic implementation requirements and the influences of semantic heterogeneity on it. The automated execution approaches to these four operations are comparatively analyzed and evaluated. These studies are helpful to grasp the concepts, the implementation requirements, the difficulties, the solutions of updates propagation and the key problems needed to be further researched, and provide the necessary research foundations for designing and developing the automated execution algorithms and the software tool.