Leveraging Model Driven Techniques for Designing Web-GIS Systems

Nowadays, Web-based Geographic Information Systems (Web-GIS) play an essential role in many organizations that provide services to people via the Internet. Although Web-GIS systems are built based on well-known standards and have common features, the problem is that building such systems needs expertise and includes high development costs; hence most organizations do not have enough resources to build their own GIS. To address this problem, we propose a model driven approach that enables the developers to generate a Web-GIS automatically. Our approach includes a metamodel as a domain specific modeling language that covers the main concepts of a Web-GIS, a variety of map controls, and different layer types. We also provide a transformation engine that automatically generates the final code of a Web-GIS from the model designed using our metamodel. To evaluate the proposed approach, we designed a simple system to show that the metamodel covers the main concepts of a Web-GIS and the generated code leads to the implementation of the system without any manual changes.