A WebGIS Interface Requirements Modeling Language

Roberto Veloso, João Araújo, Armanda Rodrigues

Abstract: WebGIS applications have become popular due to technological advances in location and sensor technology, with diverse examples with different objectives becoming available. However, there is a lack of requirements elicitation approaches for WebGIS applications, restricting the communication between stakeholders, compromising the systematization of development, and the overall quality of the resulting systems. In this paper, we present the WebGIS Interface Requirements Modeling Language (WebGIS IRML), developed to support communication between stakeholders and developers, addressing user interface requirements during the development process of a WebGIS application. WebGIS IRML is supported by a requirements model editor, which was developed using Model-Driven Development (MDD) techniques. We also describe an experiment which was performed to evaluate the language, involving 30 participants (mostly IT Engineers), to measure the ease of understanding of the language models resulting from the use of the language in the editor and capture the feedback of participants about it. Generally, the results were quite positive, encouraging the use of the language for WebGIS development.