Matías Pol'la

Towards systematic software reuse of GIS: Insights from a case study

With the development and adoption of geographic information systems, there is an increasingly amount of software resources being stored or recorded as products to be reused. At the same time, complexity of geographic services is addressed through standardization, which allows developers reaching higher quality levels. In this paper, we introduce our domain-oriented approach to developing geographic software product lines focusing on the experiences collected from a case study. It was developed in the Marine Ecology Domain (Patagonia, Argentina) and illustrates insights of the process.

Marine ecology service reuse through taxonomy-oriented SPL development

Nowadays, reusing software applications encourages researchers and industrials to collaborate in order to increase software quality and to reduce software development costs. However, effective reuse is not easy and only a limited portion of reusable models actually offers effective evidence regarding their appropriateness, usability and/or effectiveness. Focusing reuse on a particular domain, such as marine ecology, allows us to narrow the scope; and along with a systematic approach such as software product line development, helps us to potentially improving reuse. From our experiences developing a subdomain-oriented software product line (SPL for the marine ecology subdomain), in this paper we describe semantic resources created for assisting this development and thus promoting systematic software reuse. The main contributions of our work are focused on the definition of a standard conceptual model for marine ecology applications together with a set of services and guides which assist the process of product derivation. The services are structured in a service taxonomy (as a specialization of the ISO 19119 std) in which we create a new set of categories and services built over a conceptual model for marine ecology applications. We also define and exemplify a set of guides for composing the services of the taxonomy in order to fulfill different functionalities of particular systems in the subdomain. HighlightsSolutions for software reuse for GIS domains by using standard information.Domain-specific taxonomy for supporting the generation of software artifacts.Guides for using geographic services in order to fulfill different GIS functionalities of systems in the domain.Evaluation of the effectiveness of the taxonomy and guides when building an SPL and two derived products.Improvements on time and costs of new GIS products being developed.