Structural analysis of geographic information and GIS operations from a user's perspective

Abstract

Geographic information and GIS operations constitute the kernel of a geographic information system. However, most GIS fail to structure geographic information and operations with direct mappings to users' conceptual schemata and analytic needs. As a result, GIS data and operations tend to be system-dependent and switch from one system to another is not trivial. Since the conceptual schemata for structuring both declarative and procedure knowledge are system-independent, this paper suggests frameworks for structuring geographic information and operations from users' perspectives, hereby making GIS data and operations interoperable. Four related user conceptual models are identified. Location snapshots and mosaics represent a location-centered conceptualization, whereas entity and entity snapshot models suggest an entity-centered view of reality. Four levels of GIS functions include the task level, the semantic level, the syntactic level, and the interaction level. This paper concludes that the four conceptual models can provide direct mappings from users' concepts to data objects, whereas functions at the task and semantical levels appear to fit well into users' models for procedure knowledge. Therefore, structuring geographic information compatible to the four conceptual models and designing GIS functions at the task and semantical levels will advance to data models and GIS function independent of hardware and software.