A Spatial Data Infrastructure Review
Sorting the Actors and Policies from Enterprise Viewpoint
Italo Lopes Oliveira and Jugurta Lisboa Filho
Computing Department, Federal University of Viçosa (UFV), Viçosa, Minas Gerais, Brasil
Keywords: Spatial Data Infrastructure, Formal Model for SDI, RM-ODP, Actors, Policies.
Abstract: The Commission on Geoinformation Infrastructures and Standards of the International Cartographic
Association (ICA) has proposed a model based on five perspectives to describe Spatial Data Infrastructure
(SDIs) using the Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP) framework. This model was
later extended by other researchers to describe the hierarchical relationship among SDIs and the interactions
related with policies of an SDI, using the RM-ODP elements for these descriptions. However, the elements
initially proposed by the ICA and the extended elements differ in terminology and semantically. This paper
proposes unifying these elements, more precisely the actors and policies of the Enterprise Perspective
proposed in the ICA model and its extensions in order to create a single model to describe SDIs, thus
guaranteeing a common language when designing an SDI, besides facilitating knowledge sharing among
designers.
1 INTRODUCTION
Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) is a concept
developed to help the use and sharing of geospatial
data. Rajabifard and Williamson (2001) define SDI as
an environment where users, through technology, are
able to cooperate among themselves by using and
sharing geospatial data in order to reach their goals at
different political and administrative levels.
According Rajabifard and Williamson (2001), the
use of SDI assists the data sharing, avoiding its
duplication and allows the organization saves
resources, like time and money. Further, the authors
highlights that the SDI assists in the cooperation
between stakeholders, increase in the awareness
about de geospatial data importance and provides
important information about the data, like quality,
type and ownership.
Nevertheless, according to Hjelmager et al.
(2008), this concept is too broad, which causes the
development of different forms of SDIs. Aiming at
reducing the differences among SDIs, the
International Cartographic Association (ICA) has
developed a formal model that describes SDIs
regardless of technologies and implementations,
which is documented in Hjelmager et al. (2008),
Cooper et al. (2011), and Cooper et al. (2013), and
was expanded by other researchers in Béjar et al.
(2012).
The ICA model was developed based on the
Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing
(RM-ODP) framework (ISO/IEC 10746-1, 1998).
RM-ODP is an architectural framework standardized
by the International Organization for Standardization
and by the International Electrotechnical
Commission (ISO/IEC), which enables complex
systems to be specified by using five perspectives:
Enterprise, Information, Computation, Engineering,
and Technology. The use of perspectives enables a
complex system to be described as smaller,
interconnected models, each of which focusing on
different issues of the system (Linington et al., 2011).
The SDI model developed by the ICA describes
the Enterprise (Hjelmager et al., 2008) (Cooper et al.,
2011), Information (Hjelmager et al., 2008), and
Computation (Cooper et al., 2013) perspectives.
According to Hjelmager et al. (2008), the Engineering
and Technology perspectives have not been described
since they are too dependent on technologies and
implementations.
However, this model can’t be considered as a
standard yet, thus, according to Hjelmager et al.
(2008), “is necessary to validate the model in specific
user communities and at different levels of SDI”,
287
Lopes Oliveira I. and Lisboa-Filho J..
A Spatial Data Infrastructure Review - Sorting the Actors and Policies from Enterprise Viewpoint.
DOI: 10.5220/0005353802870294
In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS-2015), pages 287-294
ISBN: 978-989-758-097-0
Copyright
c
 2015 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

don’t existing works which validate the model
completely.
Béjar et al. (2012) extend the Enterprise
perspective developed by the ICA, enabling the
description of relationships among the SDIs and of
the participating organizations, the specification of
the types of enterprise objects, the types of roles of
SDI artifacts and processes, besides considering the
interactions affected by the policies imposed in the
IDE. In order to specify its extension in the SDI
model, Béjar et al. (2012) used the profile
UML4ODP, standardized by the ISO/IEC, which
determines how the UML elements must be used to
represent the RM-ODP concepts.
Further, Béjar et al. (2012) considered RM-ODP
elements which weren’t used in Hjelmager et al.
(2008) and Cooper et al. (2011) as the communities,
federations and behaviors. Community is an entity or
an entity group which have an objective that will be
accomplished through a determined behavior.
However, some elements specified by Béjar et al.
(2012) differ semantically or terminologically from
the elements specified by Hjelmager et al., (2008) and
Cooper et al. (2011). This paper presents a
comparison between the actors and policies of the
ICA model and the extension proposed by Béjar et al.
(2012) and proposes the unification of the actors and
policies in the proposals to help create a unified
model that formally describes an SDI.
The remaining of the paper is structured as
follows. Section 2 presents the actors and policies of
both proposals, comparing the actors of the ICA
model with the actor roles of the extension by Béjar
et al. (2012), besides comparing their policies.
Section 3 presents the proposal for the unification of
actors and policies of the ICA model and of the
extension proposed by Béjar et al. (2012). Section 4
presents the conclusions of this study and the future
studies.
2 ENTERPRISE PERSPECTIVE
FOR SDIS
According to Linington et al. (2011), the Enterprise
perspective focuses business goals, processes,
policies, and rules that will make up the system.
Regarding SDIs, the Enterprise perspective proposed
by Hjelmager et al. (2008) approaches the possible
actors that may interact with an SDI, being extended
by Cooper et al. (2011), the main policies that rule it,
and what parts make up an SDI and how they relate.
Béjar et al. (2012) extended this perspective,
considering the relationship among SDIs and the
interactions affected by the policies, such as the
enterprise objects and processes, besides using the
UML4ODP profile to describe the Enterprise
perspective.
Only the actors and policies of an SDI defined by
Hjelmager et al. (2008), Cooper et al. (2011), and
Béjar et al. (2012) will be discussed in this section.
2.1 Actors of an SDI
Hjelmager et al. (2008) defined six actors that may
interact and contribute with an SDI (Figure 1). They
are: Policy Maker, Producer, Provider, Value-Added
Reseller, Broker, and User.
The Policy Maker is the individual responsible for
creating the policies that will rule the working of an
SDI. The role of the Producer is to create the data and
services that make up an SDI. However, it is not the
Producer’s responsibility to make the data and
services available in the SDI, a role that belongs to
the Provider. The Broker is responsible for aiding the
dealings between the User and the Provider, for
recovering metadata from the products offered by the
Provider, and for generating catalogs based on these
metadata so as to help a User to find a Provider
holding the product that meets their needs. The Value-
Added Reseller (VAR) adds new functionalities to the
products that exist in the SDI, making them available
as new products. The User is the actor who uses the
data and services of an SDI to reach its goals
(Hjelmager et al., 2008).
Figure 1: Possible stakeholders of an SDI – (Hjelmager et
al., 2008).
However, these six actors have not been able to
describe all the responsibilities an actor can have
when interacting with an SDI. That is why Cooper et
al. (2011) specialized each of the six actors in order
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to more precisely delimit the roles of each actor and
to fulfill new concepts, such as the use of volunteered
geographical information.
The Policy Maker was specialized into the
following actors: Legislator, who determines the SDI
scope; Decision Maker, responsible for creating the
SDI policies; Secretariat, the actor who will release
the resources for the SDI to work; and Champion,
whose role is to publicize the SDI, thus promoting its
use (Cooper et al., 2011).
According to Cooper et al. (2011), the
specialization of the Producer occurs through four
groupings – Status, Motivation, Role, and Skill, as
shown in Figure 2. The specializations of the group
Status (Official Mapping Agency, Commercial
Mapping Agency, Community Interest, and Crowd
Source) are related to the influence they have in
creating products in the SDI. The group Role (Captor
of Raw Data, Submitter of Revision Notice, Passive
Producer, and Data Base Administrator) has
specialized actors according to the responsibilities
they will have in the process of creating products in
the SDI, i.e., the data and services. The group
Motivation (Special Interest, Economic, and Process)
specializes the Producer according to the reason why
it creates SDI products, while the group Skill
(Neophyte, Interested Amateur, Expert Amateur,
Expert Professional, and Expert Authority)
specializes according to the experience and quality of
the products created by the Producer.
Figure 2: Specializations of the actor Producer – (Cooper et
al., 2011).
Cooper et al. (2011) specializes the Provider into two
groups according to the product it will make available
in the SDI: data or services. Each group has three
specializations, whose greatest difference is the
product made available. The actor “A Producer that
is its own Data/Service Provider” will take up the
responsibility of making available the products it has
created. The Data/Service Distributor will make the
products created by the Producer available in the
SDI. The Data/Service Arbiter selects the data and
services that, according to its criteria, will be made
available in the SDI, possibly adding value to the
products.
The Broker was specialized according to its role
as the negotiator between providers and clients. The
Crowd-sourcing Facilitator acts as an intermediary
between a task that must be concluded and the quality
workforce that carried out this task. The Clients/users
Finder will find new clients to the products a provider
offers and the Providers Finder will find new product
providers for the SDI. The Harvester will collect the
metadata of the products offered by the provider and
integrate them. With the metadata collected, the
Cataloguer is responsible for building and
maintaining the metadata catalogs. Finally, the
Négociant helps a User find a Provider with the
products that meet its demands, besides helping the
negotiations between them (Cooper et al., 2011).
According to Cooper et al. (2011), the Publisher
specialization of the Value-Added Reseller integrates
the data from different sources and makes them
available as a new product, possibly integrating its
own data into this new format. The Service Integrator
will integrate several services and will make them
available as a new service and the Data and Metadata
Aggregator/Integrator will edit, improve, and
combine databases, offering aggregation and
integration of the metadata, integration of the
different databases, and the selection of the best
versions of the features existing in different
databases.
Finally, the User is the actor that will use the
features and data, being specialized according to its
knowledge level. The Naive Consumer has little
knowledge of geospatial data and services, while the
Advanced User has a higher level of knowledge and
is able to provide revisions and suggestions to the
products (Cooper et al., 2011).
Béjar et al. (2012) defined the Actor Roles a
community may take up in an SDI. Communities,
according to Linington et al. (2011), are a concept of
RM-ODP that defines how a set of individuals that
share a common goal must behave to reach said goal.
Actor Roles are the possible actions a community
may perform and the interactions it may take part in.
Besides the Actor Roles, Béjar et al. (2012) define the
Artifact Roles, which are not discussed in the present
study.
The actor role User will be the actor that will use
the SDI data and services. The Contributor has the
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responsibility of adding and removing data and
services in the SDI. The Custodian’s role is to create
and maintain the main SDI products and guarantee
the quality and availability of these products. The
Governing Body is responsible for managing the
policies, such as their creation, changing, and
removal, besides taking part in the decision-making
process in the SDI (Béjar et al., 2012).
Also according to Béjar et al. (2012), the actor
Operational body takes up several responsibilities,
which allow the SDI to work. Some examples
provided by the authors are: system administration,
technical support, and quality assurance. The Contact
represents the interaction of a community with other
SDIs and communities. Training the actors that
interact through the SDI is the responsibility of the
Educator.
The Promoter will promote the SDI to gather new
users and contributors and will promote the changes
that take place in the SDI to the other actors. The
Funder is responsible for releasing resources to fund
the SDI. The Member is a generic actor role used only
to represent that a community is a member of an SDI.
The two last actor roles are used to show their
importance within the SDI: Communication channel
and SDI catalog. The Communication channel is a
means for communication among the SDI actors and
the access to the data and services present in an SDI,
while the SDI catalog is an undefined means to access
the metadata of the geospatial data (Béjar et al.,
2012).
The actor roles defined by Béjar et al. (2012) play
a role similar to the actors defined by Hjelmager et al.
(2008) and Cooper et al. (2011). However, many of
the actor roles specified by Béjar et al. (2012) differ
in terminology and semantics compared to the actors
of the ICA model. Moreover, elements in either
model have no match in the other one.
The comparison between the actors defined by
Hjelmager et al. (2008) and Cooper et al. (2011) with
those from Béjar et al. (2012) was carried out based
on the functions each actor and actor role has.
The User is identical in either description, playing
the same role and having the same name. The
Contributor is the actor role responsible for making
the SDI data and services available and is able to
remove data, a responsibility similar to that of the
actor Provider in the ICA model.
The actor role Custodian has roles related to the
management of the main SDI data, which include
adding, removing, updating, and guaranteeing quality
of the main SDI data and services. In the ICA model,
only the role of adding the main SDI data has an actor
with an equivalent role, i.e., the specialization Official
Mapping Agency of the Producer. The ICA model
does not report an actor with the role of removing or
updating the SDI data and, although Hjelmager et al.
(2008) states that the Producer is responsible for
creating SDI data and services, in the Producer
specializations proposed by Cooper et al. (2011), the
SDI services are not taken into account.
The policy-creating role of the Governing Body is
equivalent to the policy-creating role of the
specialization Decision Maker of the Policy Maker.
Nevertheless, the roles of updating or removing
policies have not been stated in the ICA model, which
also has no equivalent to the role of formally
interacting with other organizations.
The actor role
Operational body is responsible for
the technical responsibilities that enable the SDI to
work. Thus, it is the actor role with the largest number
or functions in an SDI. This study considered the
roles specified by Béjar et al. (2012), including the
roles of Catalog Manager and Gateway Manager
specified in Nebert (2014). Regarding the catalogs,
the Operational body can create, update, and exclude
catalogs, responsibilities similar to those of the
specialization Cataloguer of the actor Broker.
Although it is not mentioned by Béjar et al. (2012),
the role of managing the SDI database can be
considered technical, therefore it was considered the
responsibility of the Operational body, which is
equivalent to the Database Administrator, a
specialization of the Producer in the ICA model. The
remaining roles of the Operational body have no
equivalent in the ICA model.
According to Béjar et al. (2012), the actor role
Contact represents a community in its interaction
with other SDIs, besides having some responsibilities
of the actor Broker, proposed by Hjelmager et al.
(2008). Hence, it has been defined that the Broker’s
negotiation-related roles would be the roles in
common with the actor role Contact. In the ICA
model, there is no actor with specific roles to educate
the SDI actors or provide training, with no equivalent
to the actor role Educator by Béjar et al. (2012).
The actor role Promoter will promote the SDI to
incentive new users to use it, the same role performed
by the actor Champion. Another role of the actor role
Promoter is to keep the SDI members informed of
changes in it, with no equivalent of this role in the
ICA model. The role of releasing resources for the
SDI to work exists both in the extension proposed by
Béjar et al. (2012) with the actor role Funder and in
the ICA model with the specialization of the Policy
Maker Secretariat.
The three last actor roles, i.e., Member,
Communication channel, and SDI catalog, are not
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applicable in the ICA model. This occurs due to the
semantics they receive from Béjar et al. (2012). While
the actor role Member is generic, used only to model
the SDI behavior in the UML4ODP diagrams, the
actor roles Communication channel and SDI catalog
can be considered, respectively, a means used by the
SDI member to carry out a function and an artifact
used during some SDI process.
Besides what has been presented, the ICA actor
Policy Maker has the following roles that do not exist
in the extension proposed by Béjar et al. (2012):
Determining the SDI framework, creating a business
plan, classifying the actors and aiding the
communication among them, and guaranteeing the
appropriate implementation of the policies. Another
role that does not exist in Béjar et al. (2012), the actor
Producer, also has the responsibility of correcting the
data in the SDI and sending revision notices to the
Providers whose data it considers require changes.
The actor Value-Added Reseller is the only actor
that has no equivalent role in the extension by Béjar
et al. (2012), while the Broker, except for the roles of
negotiation between users and providers, has no
match for its roles in the actor roles by Béjar et al.
(2012).
2.2 SDI Policies
According to Hjelmager et al. (2008), the policies are
one of the main components of an SDI. Figure 3
shows the SDI component, represented by a UML
class, specialized into several policies, where, despite
not being represented, the classes may relate among
themselves. Hjelmager et al. (2008) did not detail the
specializations scope of the components Policies,
therefore the definitions ahead are interpreted by the
authors of the present study.
The specialization Best Practices consist of the
policies carried out with the practices that should be
used and adopted in the SDI. Unlike the specialization
Standards, the practices defined in Best Practices are
not mandatorily adopted. The specialization
Standards sets the standards that must be adopted in
the SDI, i.e., their use is mandatory in the SDI.
The class Constraints is specialized into the
classes Legal Constraints and Business Agreements.
Legal Constraints are the policies that restrict the SDI
based on some law enforced by the government to
which the SDI is subjected. The Business Model are
the restrictions imposed on how the system must
operate to meet the user needs.
Béjar et al. (2012) also defined in their extension
the policies that an SDI can have during its existence.
Five main policies were defined, namely:
Governance, Access, Membership, Role assignment,
and Infrastructure.
Figure 3: Specializations of the component Policies –
(Hjelmager et al., 2008).
The Governance policies will determine how the
decision-making process and policy creation will be
in the SDI. The Role assignment policies will
determine which role a community will take up in the
SDI and when it will do it. Despite the term used, the
Access policies restrict the whole process of including
and removing geospatial data in SDI. The
Membership policies will regulate the rights of the
SDI members, such as access, exit, and obligations.
According to Béjar et al. (2012), the
Infrastructure policies are more directly related with
the SDI components, regulating some of their
characteristics. This policy was specialized into
several other policies that are detailed ahead. The
Standards policies define which standards will be
adopted in the whole SDI and can be specialized into
a policy called Foundation, which defines what the
main SDI geospatial data will be. The quality of the
SDI data and services will be defined by the Quality
policy. A way of increasing product quality is
providing training to the SDI members.
The way the training should take place will be
described in the Education policies. The Promotion
policy determines how the SDI will be publicized to
its members and non-members. The last specialized
policy of the Infrastructure is the Funding policy,
which dictates how the SDI will receive and must
employ the financial resources for it to work (Béjar et
al., 2012).
Table 1 shows the comparison between the
policies by Béjar et al. (2012) and the policies of the
ICA model (Hjelmager et al., 2008). Except for the
Education and Promotion policies, which have no
equivalents in the ICA model, all other policies are in
Table 1.
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3 UNIFICATION OF ACTORS
AND POLICIES
In order to facilitate the knowledge exchange among
the designers who use the ICA model along with the
extension proposed by Béjar et al. (2012), both
proposals for actors and policies were unified based
on the comparisons carried out in section 2.
As already presented, Hjelmager et al. (2008)
propose six main actors that can exist in an SDI. One
more actor will be added to these six main ones,
Operational body, proposed by Béjar et al. (2012).
Since the Operational body carries out a large number
of technical activities that allow the SDI to work, it is
not considered a specialization of the other actors.
Figure 4 shows the proposal of the main actors that
may exist in the SDI.
Figure 4: Unification of actors.
The User was not modified since its roles and
terminology in both the ICA model and in the
extension by Béjar et al. (2012) are the same.
However, the specializations defined by Cooper et al.
(2011), Naive Consumer and Advanced User, were
maintained to set the user’s level of knowledge and
ability.
The name of the Policy Maker was changed to
Governing body since it is not only responsible for the
SDI policies, but also for all administrative issues and
responsibilities in it. The specializations of the
Governing body are structured as follows:
 Legislator: No changes in this specialization.
 Policy Maker: Former Decision Maker,
responsible for creating policies that will rule the
SDI, being also able to remove and change them.
 Secretariat: Maintained all of its roles and gained
the responsibility of formally interacting with
other organizations.
 Promoter: The term Promoter, proposed by
Béjar et al. (2012), was used for more
appropriately representing the role played than
the term Champion proposed by Cooper et al.
(2011). This specialization maintains the role of
promoting the SDI to new users and publicizing
to the other SDI members the changes that take
place in it.
 Educator: The ICA model has no actor
responsible for training the SDI members, a gap
that is filled by the Educator proposed by Béjar
et al. (2012).
The Producer kept the same responsibilities and
the categorization proposed by Cooper et al. (2011)
was maintained. Only the categories Role and Status
were changed, hence they are the only ones detailed
below:
 Status
- Official Mapping Agency: Main agency in the
SDI regarding the production of data and
services. Besides being responsible for the
production of data and services, it is responsible
for guaranteeing their quality in the SDI.
- Commercial Mapping Agency: Has the same
roles as the Official Mapping Agency, with the
differential of being a profit-driven hired
agency.
- Community Interest and Crowd Source: No
changes in these specializations.
 Role
- Submitter of Revision Notice and Database
Administrator: Both specializations were
moved to specializations of the actor
Operational body since the roles they play in
the SDI are related more with the technical area
than with the production of data and services.
- Captor of Raw Data and Passive Producer: No
changes in these specializations.
The Provider will keep the same attributions
defined by Hjelmager et al. (2008) and Cooper et al.
(2011), namely making the SDI data and services
available. However, it now has also the power to
change and remove the data and services it makes
available, besides guaranteeing their availability.
The Broker and Value-Added Reseller are other
actors that suffered no changes in their original
proposals in Hjelmager et al. (2008) and Cooper et al.
(2011). It must be pointed out, however, that the
catalog-related roles – which, according to Béjar et al.
(2012), belong to the actor Operational body – will
be under the responsibility of the Broker, as proposed
by Cooper et al. (2011).
The Operational body will be the actor with the
largest number of responsibilities in the SDI and they
are all linked to technical issues that allow the SDI to
work. Given the large number or roles, only some will
be detailed in this study, mainly the ones highlighted
by Béjar et al. (2012):
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Table 1: Comparison between the policies in the extension by Béjar et al. (2012) and the ones in the ICA model.
Béjar et al. (2012) ICA
Policies Description Description
Policies
Governance
- -
Determines the
decision-making
process
Policies that define the
company’s business
model
-
BusinessModel
- -
Regulates the policy-
creation process
-
Access - -
Determines how the
SDI products can be
accessed and who can
do it
Policies that define the
company’s business
model
- BusinessModel
Membership - -
Determines the
relationships among
the SDI members
Policies that define the
company’s business
model
- BusinessModel
Role
assignment
- -
Defines the
responsibilities (actor
roles) of the SDI users
Policies that define the
company’s business
model
- BusinessModel
Infrastructure
Standards
-
Defines the standards
adopted by the SDI
Existing standards for
the SDI components
-
Standards
Foundation
Defines the main SDI
products
-
Quality -
Defines the quality
levels established in
the SDI
Policies that define the
company’s business
model
- BusinessModel
Funding -
Defines how the
resources will be
forwarded to develop
and maintain the SDI
Policies that define the
company’s business
model
- BusinessModel
No equivalence
Restrictions imposed by
laws of the State where
the SDI is located
Legal
Constraints
Constraint
No equivalence
Restrictions existing due
to contract between
companies
Business
Agreement
s
No equivalence
Practices that must be
adopted by the users
member of the SDI
BestPractices
 Technical Support: Responsible for the
maintenance of smaller systems and equipment,
besides helping SDI members according to the
problem.
 Quality Control: Oversees the SDI processes and
products to assure they are in accordance with the
quality policies enforced.
 Database Administrator: Previously a
specialization of the Producer, the Database
Administrator is responsible for guaranteeing the
data present in the database are consistent with
their specifications.
 Submitter of Revision Notice: Another
specialization belonging to the Producer, its
responsibility is to send revision notes mainly to
the Producers for SDI data reviewing and
correction.
Hjelmager et al. (2008) presented the policies that
an SDI may have, as already shown in Figure 3.
Nevertheless, due to the number of policies
proposed and little explanation of each one, the
policies by Hjelmager et al. (2008) are too generic
and ambiguous. This problem was solved by Béjar et
al. (2012) with a larger number of policies and a more
detailed explanation for them. Béjar et al. (2012),
however, by separating the Governance,
Membership, Access, and Role Assignment policies
from the Infrastructure policies, give the impression
that these policies comprise more than the SDI, which
is not their goal according to those same authors. This
study proposes a reorganization of the policies, as
shown in Table 2, with no changes required in their
names and meanings.
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Table 2: Unification of the policies by the ICA and from the
extension by Béjar et al. (2012).
Policies
Specialization
Business
Model
Governance
Membership
Quality
Access
Role Assignment
Funding
Promotion
Standards Foundation
Education Best Practices
Constraints
Legal Constraints
Business Agreements
4 FINAL CONSIDERATIONS
Given the complexity of SDIs, the ICA developed a
model that describes an SDI as a whole by using the
RM-ODP framework. Béjar et al. (2012) extended the
Enterprise perspective to consider the relationships
among the SDIs, the relations affected by the policies,
and to adequate some elements to the RM-ODP.
However, there are differences between the elements
in the ICA model and those in the extension proposed
by Béjar et al. (2012).
The actors and policies of the two proposals were
compared so that the semantic and terminology
differences between them were found. As a result, a
unification of the actors and policies between the
proposals by the ICA (Hjelmager et al., 2008)
(Cooper et al., 2011) and the extension by Béjar et al.
(2012) was proposed. Unifying the models will allow
designers to have a common language when
designing an SDI, besides facilitating the sharing of
knowledge among them.
Future studies intend to analyze the Information
and Computing perspectives of the ICA model and
adequate them to the RM-ODP framework, besides
specifying them using UML4ODP. Although the
Engineering perspective depends on technologies, the
existing models can be used as “guides” for it in case
a designer intends to use an architecture similar to
these models.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Project partially funded by the agencies CAPES,
FAPEMIG, and CNPq/MCT.
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