A complete RM-ODP case-study to integrate geospatial services and ecological niche modeling systems

Conservation and sustainable use of natural resources are relevant research areas for many different purposes, including biodiversity maintenance, global warming studies and sustainable development. An ecological niche model presents the geographic distribution of a species, considering the spatial, ecological and evolutionary perspectives. It also allows the definition of present, past and future scenarios for species distribution. The study of species distribution can be determinant for their management, so ecological niche modeling is a major current research trend. However, providing the resources for ecological niche modeling is a highly complex computational problem because it demands solutions with many integration, distribution and interoperability features. The Reference Model of Open Distributed Processing provided by the International Organization for Standardization, ISO RM-ODP, establishes five viewpoints to design a system: Enterprise, Computational, Information, Engineering, and Technology. Each viewpoint treats specifics constraints in order to describe a complex architectural solution, as the ones required for ecological niche modeling. The Open Geospatial Consortium, OGC, defined the OGC Reference Model, a guideline to provide the features for geospatial services, another major software requirement for ecological niche modeling. This work proposes an architectural solution for ecological niche modeling integrating the OGC and RM-ODP specifications in order to address all the constraints of the problem by the usage of viewpoints. The presented solution is already implemented and available on the Internet. Besides solving the problem itself, the solution is in the form of a complete RM-ODP case-study and may also be used as reference for further works in the ecological niche modeling research area.