Xinghua Cheng

Xinghua Cheng, Di Hu, Handong He et al.

Model web services provide an approach for implementing and facilitating the sharing of geographic models. The description and acquisition of inputs and outputs (IO) of geographic models is a key issue in constructing and using model web services. These approaches for describing and acquiring the data formats of the IO of geographic models can be classified into two categories, i.e., intermediate-data-format-based and native-data-format-based. Nonetheless, these two categories mainly consider the description of the IO of geographical models but relatively pay little attention to the acquisition. To address this issue, this paper proposes an approach for automatically parsing data formats of the IO utilizing the relationship between the IO and source codes. This proposed approach can utilize such a strict and coupling relationship and the expression form of the data formats in the source codes to retrospectively derive the IO data format and automatically generate data format documentation. The feasibility of the proposed approach has been verified via a geographical model coded in the FORTRAN language, which shows that it significantly improves the efficiency of writing data format specifications and promotes sharing geographic models as model web services.

Xinghua Cheng, Erjie Hu, Di Hu

File reading is the basis for data sharing and scientific computing. However, manual programming for file reading is labour-intensive and time-consuming, as data formats are heterogeneous and complex. To address such an issue, this study proposes a novel approach for the automatic generation of file reading programs based on structured and self-described data format information. This approach provides two modes composed of sequentially and randomly reading. The file data format is described by Data Format Markup Language and thus DFML documents are generated. The formation of data type sequences by parsing those DFML documents. The generation of programs for sequential or random reading data with formed data type sequences and general programing rules for specific programming languages. A tool named DFML Editor was developed for generating and editing DFML documents. Case studies on binary files, i.e., ESRI point shapefiles and plain text files, i.e., input files of Storm Water Management Model, were conducted with the software developed for automatic program generation and file reading. Experimental results show that the proposed approach is effective for automatically generating programs for reading files. The idea in this study is also helpful for automatically writing files.