TY - JOUR
T1 - On augmenting database design-support environments to capture the geo-spatio-temporal data semantics
AU - Khatri, Vijay
AU - Ram, Sudha
AU - Snodgrass, Richard T.
N1 - Funding Information:
We are indebted to three anonymous reviewers and the associate editor for their insightful comments that substantially improved this paper. We are grateful to Arvind Gupta, Jun Liu, Mihir Shah and Xingtao Wang for their help in development of various parts of DISTIL. This research was supported in part by NASA grant 314401, and NSF grants IIS-0100436 and EIA-0080123.
PY - 2006/3
Y1 - 2006/3
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Computer-Aided Software/System Engineering tool
KW - Data semantics
KW - Database design
KW - Geo-spatio-temporal database
KW - Semantic model
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U2 - 10.1016/j.is.2004.10.001
DO - 10.1016/j.is.2004.10.001
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:27844494706
VL - 31
SP - 98
EP - 133
JO - Information Systems
JF - Information Systems
SN - 0306-4379
IS - 2
ER -