Application of automated software development techniques in Geographic Information Systems

Abstract

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) has been widely adopted within different areas such as infrastructure administration, traffic control or environmental management. Despite each application can be very specific in terms of its functional scope, they share a set of elements that make all systems very similar. These characteristics have made us consider investigating software engineering techniques that may be useful to support the automation of the development of these applications from high-level specifications. Our contributions are as follows: (i) a declarative, close to natural, domain-specific language for the development of GIS, that allows users without deep programming knowledge to specify and generate a basic system; (ii) the theoretical bases for the application of multilevel modelling to GIS-based applications in different real-world scenarios. This can improve the simplicity, expressiveness, and flexibility of the modelling process and (iii) new mutation operators, the automation of the workflow to generate the mutate versions and a new tool to support the application of mutation testing in the GIS domain.