How to analyse user requirements for service-oriented environmental information systems

Environmental Information Systems (EIS) allow the user to store, query and process environmental information and visualize it in thematic maps, diagrams and reports. Although service-orientation is the predominant architectural style of EIS there is no design methodology that brings together the requirements and the expert knowledge of EIS users with the services and information offerings of existing EIS, and, in addition, explicitly obeys the guidelines and constraints of geospatial standards of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) as side-conditions. This paper focuses on the analysis phase as a prelude to service-oriented design. It proposes a way of gathering, describing and documenting user requirements in terms of extended use cases which may then be used to perform the abstract design step following SERVUS which denotes a Design Methodology for Information Systems based upon Geospatial Service-oriented Architectures and the Modelling of Use Cases and Capabilities as Resources.