Application of ER and CONGOO formalisms in a spatial database-reengineering project

Copyright This online paper may be cited in line with the usual academic conventions. You may also download it for your own personal use. This paper must not be published elsewhere (e.g. mailing lists, bulletin boards etc.) without the author's explicit permission Please note that : • it is a draft; • this paper should not be used for commercial purposes or gain; • you should observe the conventions of academic citation in a version of the following form: Roland Billen, Dimos Pantazis and Bernard Cornélis (2004) Application of ER and CONGOO formalisms in a spatial database-reengineering project, published by the De-Abstract. This article discusses the application of a classic formalism (ER) and a geo-formalism (CONGOO) in the design stage of a spatial database reengineering. Through a real scale project, the advantages and disadvantages of both formalisms are presented as well as the different steps of the conceptual reengineering process. This study confirms the necessity of using a geo-formalism but does not reject the ER formalism as a first basic common language. 4 Forewords This contribution stems from a project involving both the Université de Liège and the Centre Informatique pour la Région Bruxelloise (CIRB). The project consisted in an analytical study of a set of spatial and alphanumeric databases from Brussels UrbIS 2 ®© (Billen et al. 1998a, 1998b, 1998c, Sheeren and Billen 2000). As a result of the study, a data dictionary was developed, two conceptual models were elaborated, one with the Entity/Relationship (ER) formalism and one with the CONception Géographique Orientée Objet (CONGOO) formalism, as well as a set of data quality guidelines for the validation of the database's objects. This article illustrated by results deriving from the real scale project focuses on the conceptual stage of spatial database re-engineering.