Frameworks and Patterns are important instruments that enable the reuse of successful software solutions in recurrent problems. Geographic information systems, on the other hand, are usually designed by people with only little knowledge of database modeling techniques. Therefore, we believe that analysis patterns and conceptual frameworks can both facilitate and improve geographic database design in many organizations. In order to be used by designers with such a wide variety of backgrounds (e.g., cartographers, biologists, and architects), analysis patterns and conceptual frameworks for geographic database design must rely upon an easy to learn and to use, semantically rich conceptual data model. This paper introduces the GeoFrame, a conceptual framework that serves as a starting point for the conceptual modeling of geographic databases. It relies on an extension of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) that can also be used to define new analysis patterns for geographic applications. ...