Specifying analysis patterns for geographic databases on the basis of a conceptual framework

Abstract

Frameworks and Patterns are important instruments that enable the reuse of successful software solutions in recurrent problems. Geographic information systems, on the other hand, are usually designed by people with only little knowledge of database modeling techniques. Therefore, we believe that analysis patterns and conceptual frameworks can both facilitate and improve geographic database design in many organizations.In order to be used by designers with such a wide variety of backgrounds (e.g., cartographers, biologists, and architects), analysis patterns and conceptual frameworks for geographic database design must rely upon an easy to learn and to use, semantically rich conceptual data model. This paper introduces the GeoFrame, a conceptual framework that serves as a starting point for the conceptual modeling of geographic databases. It relies on an extension of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) that can also be used to define new analysis patterns for geographic applications. In addition, we present an example of an analysis pattern that was extracted out of a database schema which was itself derived from GeoFrame. This pattern can be identified in various urban GIS applications.

Modeling with a UML Profile

“…The stereotype concept, one of the UML extension mechanisms, allows the definition of new specific model elements generating a profile tailored for a particular problem domain (OMG 2007). There are some UML extensions for GeoDB modeling (Bédard et al 2004;Borges et al 2001;Lisboa Filho and Iochpe 1999). To exemplify a spatial UML profile, described here is the Spatialtemporal UML-GeoFrame modeling language, which extends the UML, generating a profile of stereotypes to support the GeoDB conceptual modeling.…”

“…At that time, the use of the object-oriented paradigm in system development was becoming more and more popular. Accordingly, several authors used as their base object-oriented design methods, such as OMT (Rumbaugh et al 1991) and OOA (Coad and Yourdon 1991), proposing extensions for the modeling of spatiotemporal aspects of geographical phenomena (Bédard et al 2004;Borges et al 2001;Lisboa Filho and Iochpe 1999).…”

WiSPY: A Tool for Visual Specification and Verification of Spatial Integrity Constraints

“…The Constraint Checker generated from the grammar by using the ANTLR parser generator 8 can be activated by the user during map editing phase. In particular, the input of WiSPY is a set of geographic data whose type is defined in the OMT-G data model.…”

“…We have chosen OMT-G [4] for its capability of explicitly specifying the constraints in associations and attributes [9], which is a limitation of the models extending UML [18], such as Ext. UML [16] and GeoFrame [8]. Moreover, OMT-G seems to be the most simply and user-friendly notation for nonexpert constraint designers.…”

Modelling Spatial Whole–Part relationships using an ISO-TC211 conformant approach

“…Other researches have proposed conceptual models or design patterns for the design of spatial applications and databases [1,3,4,[7][8][9][12][13][14]22,23,[26][27][28]30,32]. These works define spatial data types and spatial relationships, but only some of them explicitly define modelling abstractions for SWP relationships [1,7,8,13,14,22,27,28] and only [27,28] explicitly analyze how SWP relationships apply the general classification of Whole-Part relationship properties of [2].…”