An Environment for Modeling and Design of Geographic Applications

This paper presents UAPÉ—a computational environment for modeling and designing environmental geographic applications. UAPÉ is aimed at end-users who are experts in their application domain, but who do not have adequate background in software engineering or database design, and thus are unable to take full advantage of available GIS tools. Its goal is to reduce the impedance between the end-users view of the world and its implementation in Geographic Information Systems. The environment has been designed and implemented so that it can be considered as an auxiliary layer to be coupled to a GIS. The major features of this layer are: it has an open architecture, being independent of a specific GIS, so that it can be coupled to different systems; it allows the user to deal only with the conceptual view of the geographic reality, abstracting the implementation details; it supports a geographic application design methodology, fully integrated with a high-level semantic data model, so there is no impedance mismatch between application design and data modeling.