A Declarative Modeling Method for Geospatial Applications

Abstract

Complex geospatial applications usually require the coordinated organization of multi-source data, map layers, user interfaces, interaction behaviors, spatial analysis functions, and domain business services. Their application structure and business functions are often scattered in front-end code, map operations, and back-end services, resulting in inconsistent application expression, high functional coupling, and difficulties in reusing existing capabilities. To address these issues, this paper proposes a declarative modeling method for geospatial applications. Firstly, this paper designs the description specification for geospatial applications (AppSpec), which enables the formal description of the constituent elements of geospatial applications and the interaction relationships among these elements. Secondly, by encapsulating existing spatial analysis methods and domain business functions, reusable capability plugins are formed. Finally, a runtime engine is constructed to drive the parsing and execution of AppSpec, and specific business requirements are realized by calling the encapsulated geospatial capability plugins. To evaluate the proposed method, a prototype for POI-based urban functional-zone analysis in Nanjing, China, was developed. The case study demonstrates that application structure, cross-component interactions, and geospatial capability invocation can be coordinated within a common executable specification. A quantitative benchmark further shows stable and responsive runtime coordination under the evaluated workloads, with all 90 measured executions completing successfully. These results demonstrate the technical feasibility and runtime characteristics of the proposed method under the evaluated conditions.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Systems, 2026 · DOI ↗