Extending the Unified Modeling Language to support spatiotemporal applications

Abstract

Recent interest in spatiotemporal data modeling has been primarily on data structures and access mechanisms, content based description and query, or extensions of existing data models to satisfy the requirements of a specific representation of space and time. However, there is a need for a general conceptual data modeling language suitable for specification and analysis of applications based on different spatiotemporal representations. In this paper, an extension of a standard object-oriented modeling language, Unified Modeling Language (UML), is proposed which includes support of object and field-based representations of space, event-based and periodic representations of time, and alternative interpolation semantics. A new concept of attribute groups is introduced to allow concise specification of common spatiotemporal properties and constraints.