Abstract
A database design-support environment supports a data analyst in eliciting, articulating, specifying and validating data-related requirements. Extant design-support environments - based on conventional conceptual models - do not adequately support applications that need to organize data based on time (e.g., accounting, portfolio management, personnel management) and/or space (e.g., facility management, transportation, logistics). For geo-spatio-temporal applications, it is left to database designers to discover, design and implement - on an ad-hoc basis - the temporal and geospatial concepts that they need to represent the miniworld. To elicit the geo-spatio-temporal data semantics, we characterize guiding principles for augmenting the conventional conceptual database design approach, present our annotation-based approach, and illustrate how our proposed approach can be instantiated via a proof-of-concept prototype. Via a proof-of-concept database design-support environment, we exemplify our annotation-based approach, and show how segregating "what" from "when/where" via annotations satisfies ontologic- and cognition-based requirements, dovetails with existing database design methodologies, results in upward-compatible conceptual as well as XML schemas, and provides a straightforward mechanism to extend extant design-support environments.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 98-133 |
Number of pages | 36 |
Journal | Information Systems |
Volume | 31 |
Issue number | 2 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Mar 1 2006 |
Keywords
- Computer-Aided Software/System Engineering tool
- Data semantics
- Database design
- Geo-spatio-temporal database
- Semantic model
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Software
- Information Systems
- Hardware and Architecture