Designing Geographic Analysis Processes on the Basis of the Conceptual Framework Geoframe

The investment in geographic information systems (GIS) is usually justified by their ability of supporting the execution of geographic analysis processes (GP). The conceptual design of a GP makes it independent of a specific GIS product and enables designers to define the process at a high level of abstraction using a language that enforces a set of logical constraints and is yet easy to learn. On the other hand, in order to support interoperability a GP conceptual model should be sufficiently generic to allow a GP definition to be translated to any of the logical data models implemented by existing GIS commercial products. This paper presents an extension to GeoFrame, a conceptual GIS framework that supports the conceptual design of spatio-temporal, geographic databases (GDB). This extension is actually a conceptual GP data model relying on a set of UML diagrams as well as on a methodology of how to apply them to analysis process design. On the basis of the PGeoFrame-A, the definition of a GP starts by the identification of its associated use cases. Both control and data flows are described by means of activity diagrams with the new modeling constructs provided by UML 2.0. Input as well as output data introduced in the workflow definition are described in detail through a class diagram. In this way, CASE tools based on UML can be adapted to translate GP conceptual design to the specific scripts as well as macro definition languages of different existing GIS products.