Extended Spatiotemporal UML: Motivations, Requirements and Constructs

This chapter presents a conceptual modeling language for spatiotemporal applications that offers built-in support for capturing spatially referenced, time-varying information. More specifically, the well-known object-oriented Unified Modeling Language (UML) is extended to capture the semantics of spatiotemporal data. The extension, Extended Spatiotemporal UML, maintains language clarity and simplicity by introducing a small base set of fundamental modeling constructs: spatial, temporal, and thematic. These constructs can then be combined and applied at attribute, attribute group, association, and/ or class levels of the object-oriented model; where the attribute group is an additional construct introduced for attributes with the same spatiotemporal properties. A formal functional specification of the semantic modeling constructs and their symbolic combinations is given and an example is used to illustrate the simplicity and flexibility of this approach.