From the Conceptual Design of Spatial Constraints to their Implementation in Real Systems

The spatial data community recognizes the need for procedures that automatically validate spatial integrity constraints defined at conceptual level. This validation becomes particularly important in an open and distributed environment, like a Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI), where the level of integration and interoperability is very high. However, the current gap between the conceptual design of a spatial database and its implementation into a GIS system makes the definition of spatial constraints useful only for documentation purposes and not for automatic validation. The GeoUML modeling language provides a set of predefined OCL templates for expressing the most common spatial constraints. In this paper, we deal with the validation problem by proposing a methodology for automatically translating the OCL constraints of GeoUML into SQL spatial queries, thus obtaining a platform independent general validation tool.