Precise Modeling and Verification of Topological Integrity Constraints in Spatial Databases: From an Expressive Power Study to Code Generation Principles

An Adverbial Approach for the Formal Specification of Topological Constraints Involving Regions with Broad Boundaries

“…In order to define spatial integrity constraints, Duboisset et al [10] and Pinet et al [16] proposed an extension of OCL's meta-model. This extension consists in adding geographic basic types (i.e., point, line, and region) to the meta-model of OCL (Figure 5).…”

“…In Spatial OCL [10,16] OVSType is a generalization of three basic types of objects with vague shapes: broad point, line with a vague shape and region with a broad boundary. A region with a broad boundary is composed by two crisp polygons (i.e., this relation is expressed through an aggregation between the type Region with a broad boundary and the type Polygon), which represent the minimal extent and maximal extent of the object, respectively.…”

“…A spatial database-oriented language should allow the specification of both alphanumeric and spatial constraints [10,16]. Currently, an extension of the Object Constraint Language (OCL) called Spatial OCL [10,16] allows formal expression of spatial integrity constraints. Spatial OCL is based on the 9-Intersection model [11].…”

“…A classification of integrity constraints involving objects with vague shapes has been proposed in [2]. In this paper, we address the problem of the lack of terminology in Spatial OCL [10,16] to express topological constraints involving objects with vague shapes. The main objective of this paper is to extend Spatial OCL in order to support topological constraints for regions with broad boundaries.…”

“…Then, we present a spatial model for regions with broad boundaries and qualitative identification of their topological relations according to the Qualitative Min-Max (QMM) model presented in [3]. In section 3, we review related works on the specification of topological constraints, especially the approach using Spatial OCL [10,16]. In section 4, we present our extension of Spatial OCL in order to formally express topological relations between regions with broad boundaries by using the QMM model [3].…”