A Conceptual Modeling Language for Spatiotemporal Applications

This paper presents a conceptual modeling language for spatiotemporal applications that offers built-in support for capturing geo-referenced, time-varying information. More specifically, the well-known object-oriented Unified Modeling Language (UML) is extended to capture the semantics of space and time as they appear in spatiotemporal applications. Language clarity and simplicity is maintained in the new language, the Extended Spatiotemporal UML, which introduces a small base set of modeling constructs, namely, the spatial, temporal and thematic constructs, which can then be combined and applied at different levels (i.e., attribute, association, object class) in the object-oriented model. An example is used to illustrate the simplicity and flexibility of this approach, and a formal functional specification of the semantic constructs and their symbolic combinations is given.