Featured Research

Augmenting a Conceptual Model with Spatio-Temporal Annotations

Abstract

While many real-world applications need to organize data based on space (e.g., geology, geo-marketing, environmental modeling) and/or time (e.g., accounting, inventory management, personnel management), existing conventional conceptual models do not provide a straightforward mechanism to explicitly capture the associated spatial and temporal semantics. As a result, it is left to database designers to discover, design and implement—on an ad-hoc basis—the temporal and spatial concepts that they need. We propose an annotation-based approach that allows a database designer to focus first on non-temporal and non-geospatial aspects (i.e., “what”) of the application, and subsequently augment the conceptual schema with geo-spatio-temporal annotations (i.e., “when” and “where”). Via annotations, we enable a supplementary level of abstraction that succinctly encapsulates the geo-spatio-temporal data semantics and naturally extends the semantics of a conventional conceptual model. An overarching assumption in conceptual modeling has always been that expressiveness and formality need to be balanced with simplicity. We posit that our formally defined annotationbased approach is not only expressive but also straightforward to understand and implement.

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