A Domain Specific Language for Web-based GIS

Abstract

Geographic information systems (GIS) manage entities with a spatial component (typically, in the form of a point, line, or polygon defined according to a known geographic coordinate system), and provide specific operations to process them, and specific interfaces to visualize them. Although different GIS may provide a completely different set of functionalities, they all share a common set of concepts, architecture, and technologies. Therefore, in the development of GIS there are typically large parts of the system that can be very repetitive. In this paper, we present a domain-specific language to develop GIS from high-level declarative specifications. We present a metamodel for web-based GIS, and a domain-specific language based on that metamodel. We also present a usage example that shows how the language would be used in a real scenario.