An initial model of the computation viewpoint for a spatial data infrastructure

Abstract

The Commission of Spatial Data Standards of the International Cartographic Association (ICA) is working on defining formal models and technical characteristics of Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI). The Commission has already presented models of the Enterprise and Information Viewpoints from the ISO reference Model for Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP) standard (ISO/IEC 10746:1995). The Commission is now taking this further to model the Computation Viewpoint, which describes how the different services of an SDI fit together. The models should be seen as a continuing step towards the overall model of the SDI and its technical characteristics. The Commission has identified six broad groupings of services; Registry, Data, Processing, Portrayal, Application and Management. The interactions between these high-level services have been modelled using the unified Modeling language (UML) Component Diagrams. The detailed services have been modelled using UML Class diagrams (Object Management Group 2005).