Service Oriented Architecture (SOA): a case study in Geographic Information Systems

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a trend for the development of Object-Oriented applications. This is due in part for the possibility of reusing and encapsulating provided by Web services, but is motivated by business modeling concepts which seek to integrate software modeling to corporate objectives. However, SOA can be extended to Geographic Information Systems (GIS), although the use of geographic services according to this architecture still remains a andly unexplored field, showing broad possibilities of evolution. This article presents a short theoretic study on SOA, with an experiment on address geocoding. In this case study, actual addressing data from the city of Belo Horizonte (MG) were employed. Test datasets were validated after being put through a three phase process: parsing, matching, and locating. The degree of precision obtained by the process allowed evaluating the accuracy of the algorithm in each case. Results obtained in the tests made showed a highly satisfactory precision. We believe that this experience could be extended to other similar situations, provided some necessary adaptations are made.