Taxonomy-Oriented Domain Analysis of GIS: A Case Study for Paleontological Software Systems
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The manuscript describes an interesting study attempting to apply the reuse concept from software product lines to improve the development of systems enabling the documentation of paleontological processes.
The research would be a useful contribution to the body of research in the area, if the authors take into account the following suggestions:
(1) ABSTRACT: please describe the acronym used or refer to the appendix that lists them all early in the publication
(2) Please ensure the work is written in correct English. I have highlighted a plethora of mistakes but it is difficult to assess the quality of the study described, if it is necessary to amend a written expression on a frequent basis. I would advise the authors to contact a native English colleague to review the paper prior to publishing.
(3) Details of the cost model should be a useful contribution to the publication, at least explain why the measure described (graph-edit distance) was selected.
(4) In (page 11, line 325-) "Specifically, these two steps were managed by the software engineers by guiding paleontologists in describing their tasks and focusing on the way digital information must be managed in order to support the defined processes"
(5) Details of the procedure followed for an effective interaction between software engineers and paleontologists enables a better understanding of the effectiveness of the research process used for this activity.
(6) (page 13, line 351-) "which was designed for finding the best service candidates of the taxonomy..." Details on how "best service" is identified is necessary, please elaborate
(7) (page 16, line 398-) "After designing, successful reuse will be indicated" It seems two indicators are used to determine "successful reuse", i.e. complexity and large number of reused services, how exactly is the decision of "large" and "complexity" made? please explain
(8) (page 16, line 438-) "Secondly, the service categorization was used to analyze functionality in general. Each datasheet of the paleobiology subdomain was analyzed by considering the service interactions of each datasheet, and then compared to other subdomains’ datasheets"
(9) How does the system guarantee all service interactions are fully covered, please explain
(page 17, line 459-) the choice of cost model in this case should be clarified even if it is only an initial attempt
(10) (page 20, line 536-) "...relational database; dealing with complexity of diagrams potentially hinders the effectivity of the proposal in the real cases"
why this problem (if the authors can't explain, they should at least provide a reference that discusses the problem)
Other changes are embedded in the electronic revised version of the manuscript which is attached to this form.
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
A point‐by‐point explanation is attached here.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The presented study is very interesting, including geographical information in a software supporting the documentation in paleontological processes, and domain analysis, based on standards and existing taxonomies.
However, some improvements, especially in the descriptions and structure of the text is needed.
Moreover, a proper section clearly presenting results is missing, and it would be valuable to add an example of the system working. Especially for a geoinformation-oriented journal, it should be interesting to understand the results and the reciprocal added values by using spatial data in the developed system.
More in detail,
It is necessary to clarify and give a little more background about the terms which come from the computer science field and are not straightforward for the ‘geoscience’ world. ’Software product line’, ‘datasheet’ are some of them.
The structure of the paper should be revised, explaining clearly objectives, background and previous work in the introduction; defining the methodology clearly in the following section; and explaining the achieved results with clear images and, if possible, examples.
In the following, there are some suggestions:
The section ‘related work’ should be immediately after the introduction, and the background about the developed system; also section 2.4. should be better placed in the introduction.
What is called ‘background’ could already be part of the methodology.
Instead, in the section 3, some lines (e.g. 201 - 206) are repeating the previous introductory parts, whilst it should be better to explain already some results.
Consider writing some parts in more schematic text, with numbered/bulleted lists and clear explanations of the parts, and examples, if possible.
The Figures must be all cited in the text before, and should be clearer: add explanations in captions, explain the used codes (colors, type of text, symbols, arrows, type of boxes…) in a legend and make sure that acronyms are understandable (if possible, it could be better to write them again in the legend).
It is necessary to improve the quality of some figures, for readability and graphics. E.g. the meaning of the blue arrows in figure 1 is not completely clear at a first glance, Figure 2 is little readable and some entities are not completely included in the circles, the symbols are not explained; in Figure 3 and 5 a legend could clarify the used symbology (also in Figure 10 and 11, at least repeat the colours meaning in the captions), Figure 4 is a little confused and ‘variability model’ is explained in the text following; Figure 9 could be more meaningful if more specific than symbolic, with the actual included parts. Also Figure 12 can represented more effectively.
In figure 5 it is not very clear what was mapped to what, and what is the reference for the mapping.
Figure 6 and the related part are useful to understand the work, therefore it would be more effective at the beginning of the methodological section, together with the related text (section 4).
In the part from page 19, it could be meaningful to explain the differences between the datasheets which are behaving differently, without identifying them simply with a number.
A revision of the English is necessary, and some errors are frequent (e.g. ‘aN’ instead of ‘a’ in front of words beginning with ’s’, and others). Some sentences are little clear (e.g. ‘this work has revealed some lessons’ page 22 lines 611-612).
Author Response
A point-by-point explanation is attached here, together with the revised article.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
