Abstract

Documenting the paleontological process includes data produced by different techniques and protocols, which are used by paleontologists to prospect and eventually find a new fossil. Nowadays, together with the aforementioned data, a great amount of information is also available in terms of georeferenced systems, including contextual as well as descriptive information. However, the use of this information into a model capable of recognizing similarities and differences is still an open issue within the Natural Heritage community. From the software engineering field, software product lines are models that focus on reusing common assets, in such a way that new software developments are only concern on differentiation relying on already modeled (and implemented) systems. This synergy leads us to apply our taxonomy-oriented domain analysis for Software Product Line (SPL) development, when building systems for documenting the paleontological process. In this paper, we introduce the approach for building such software systems, and illustrate its use through a case study in North Patagonia. Findings show promissory results in terms of reuse.

Highlights

  • In the geographical area, software applications share behavior and similar information that at first glance would seem impossible

  • What can be similar between analyzing the geographic distribution of schools of fish in the ocean and identifying sites where paleontological findings have been made? It is evident that both activities share a spatial positioning, a geographic area from which to analyze distributions of specimens, whether they are alive in the ocean or they lived millions of years ago in Patagonia

  • Through a process that is both top-down and bottom-up, we focus on modeling the paleontology subdomain with and for reuse: “with” reuse, because we reuse the existing Software Product Line (SPL) that was modeled for marine ecology, and “for” reuse because we are modeling the aspects of the new subdomain

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Summary

Introduction

Software applications share behavior and similar information that at first glance would seem impossible. The domain analysis is a common activity when developing software product lines, new challenges remain when we consider larger scale domains as the geography one This domain involves a wide range of services that can be applied to other domains such as medicine, e-government, biology, etc. The application of a software product line development process allows us to follow a systematic approach towards maximizing reuse In this way, the major contributions of this paper are twofold: (1) a service taxonomy development process by standardizing and specializing geographic information as a domain hierarchy, and (2) a software product line development approach, which makes use of the service taxonomy to define reusable functionalities.

Related Work
Background
Standards for GIS
A Taxonomy for the Marine Ecology Subdomain
Contextual Information
Our Domain Analysis Approach in a Nutshell
A taxonomy to Assist Domain Analysis in SPLs for the Paleontology Subdomain
Mapping Conceptual Models
Domain Requirements
Standard Information
Information about Other Domains
Guides for Composing Services during SPL Design And Product Implementation
Reuse Analysis
Findings
Conclusions and Future Work

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