Object-Oriented Requirements Engineering for GIS-Applications

We stress the importance of requirements engineering (RE) for the developmentoflarge scale software in general and for GIS-applications in particular. RE analyses the problem domain and defines the requirements upon the software to be developed. We discuss two GIS-application scenarios, the so-called topological scenario and the network scenario, we frequently encountered in real life projects. Our investigations reveal that conventional RE-methods like e.g. Coad/Yourdon's Object-Oriented Analysis (OOA) are not capable to model GIS-specific requirements appropriately. To overcome the deficiencies of conventional OOA we introduce GeoOOA which complements OOAby suitable geoprimitives and allows for a more adequate treatmentofGISspecific requirements. We provide GeoOOA-models of a broadcasting and a power supply domain as first validation steps for the usefulness of GeoOOA