Geographic Digital Content Components André Santanchè Advisor: Dr. Claudia Bauzer Medeiros Database Group Unicamp - Brazil

Summary Goal Reuse and Interoperability Digital Content Component –Previous Work –Digital Content Component Model –Geo Component Project with Digital Content Components Concluding Remarks

Overview Goal: Support reuse of GIS Projects GIS Project: A collection of related data pieces (e.g., maps, graphs or tables), composed and processed in a specific sequence by software components.

Reuse and Interoperability Reuse and interoperability are closely related dimensions, since the increase in interoperability expands the opportunities to reuse. Current approaches: –open standards for GIS data representation; –open standards for GIS process interoperability.

GIS data representation GeoTIFF – based on the popular TIFF format – embeds georeferencing capabilities in the image file. ESRI Shapefile – format is a standard for vector data. shx shp polygonal shapes in a map Index of shapes shapes attribute values

GIS process interoperability Open GIS Consortium (OGC) defines: –Geography Markup Language (GML) – XML based language to enable data interoperability. –OGC Web Services (OWS) – architecture that uses Web Services technology to enable inter- process interoperability. Interoperability promotes a component- based software development approach.

Problem If a user wants to share an entire project he could face two problems: –How to enable systematic access the same collection of components used to develop it? –How to represent the relationship between different kinds of data objects, managed by distinct specialized software components?

Our Proposal A glue to integrate reuse and interoperability standards in an unified project. It involves: –a homogeneous model to represent any piece of GIS data and software component Digital Content Component. –a mechanism to connect Digital Content Components in a project.

Digital Content Component Can encapsulate any kind of digital data: program code, raster data, vectorial images, tables, etc. Based in a previous project – Anima. Digital Content Component Software Component Image Table

Magic House Previous Project Anima Anima Framework Magic House is an authoring tool for building educational applications based on composition of software components. A framework used by Magic House.

Magic House Previous Project Anima Anima Framework Uses Web standards (XML, XSL, RDF and OWL) to allow the interoperability of educational applications.

Digital content component: extend benefits of packaging, deployment and composition to any kind of digital content. Component management: allow proper storage, search and retrieval of components. Extensions of Anima

Digital Content Component Production/Use Cycle

Inside Geo Component

Workflow based Decision Support System developed at UNICAMP for environmental planning, now being used in agriculture planning. WOODSS

Pedological Zoning for Coffee Crop

Concluding Remarks This project presents a solution for data and program code reuse to face the proliferation of geographic data formats and software tools. The main contribution is a homogeneous model to deal with software components and data objects in the geo-information processing domain. The work combines two previous experiences: Anima and WOODSS.

Anima Production/Use Cycle

Categories of Components We differentiate between two kinds of component: –process components; –passive components.

Process Components Encapsulates any kind of process description (sequences of instructions or plans) that can be executed by a computer.

Contain data that can be used by a process component. Passive Components

Components can be combined into more complex components. This can be done repeatedly/recursively. Combining and Composing Components

Componentizing WOODSS second approach Execution

Componentizing WOODSS first approach Executio n

Using Components Example In Content Engineering, the single-sourcing practice is usual, where the same source can be presented on many output formats. Report Map plot