| The Grid Computing research community has produced several protocols, software tools and services in order to support continuing research and developmental work with various approaches to design and implementation of computational and data grids. In particular, various data grid architectures have been proposed and constructed in recent years. For the most part, the construction of such systems has proceeded using traditional programming approaches in which the most basic requirements are determined first, then proceeding to development of codes without reference to complete, validated designs. This leads to well known problems in arriving at robust, dependable code frameworks that are difficult to modify, extend and maintain.; In this thesis we examine several approaches to designing geographic information system (GIS) data grids. We produce a fully validated design that can serve as a test and partial proof of the validity of some known approaches taken so far. In order to accomplish our goals, we employ certain established and emerging methods from Software Engineering, including model driven architecture (MDA) and object constraint language (OCL) based techniques. The resulting analysis includes measures of the design complexity and some observations concerning performance complexity. |
