FORMAL SPECIFICATION AND VERIFICATION OF XML-BASED BUSINESS DOMAIN MODELS

Wolfgang Schuetzelhofer, Karl M. Goeschka

2004

Abstract

The rapidly growing use of XML in the development of business to business (B2B) applications requires new approaches in building enterprise application infrastructures. In this field the modeling of business domain semantics, thus focusing on the user’s perception of data, in contrast to physical data representation, is gathering more and more importance. It is increasingly important to provide a sound mathematical foundation on modeling business domains, together with a well defined way to map business domain semantics to XML-structures. In our recent work we propose a semantic meta model, built on set- and algebra-theory, considered to serve for the formal definition of operations and transformations and to prove the correctness and completeness of design methods. Based on the mathematical model we propose an XML language to construct domain models and to formally express business domain semantics. The language not only allows to express structural schemas and static constraints but also provides to formulate dynamic business rules, which is considered critical for the quality of a business domain model and which is therefore centrally focused in our work. In addition we provide an XML syntax to encode domain instances and we apply standardized XML technologies to formally verify the validity of domain instances with respect to their specifying domain models. With our paper we contribute to the field of formal software engineering by proposing a business domain modeling language based on XML and founded on a sound mathematical model. The expression of dynamic business rules and the application of XML technologies to formally verify validity of domain instances and of entire domain models are the strength of our approach.

References

  1. Wang W., Rada R., 1998. “Structured Hypertext with Domain Semantics”; ACM TIS, 16,4, pp.372-412
  2. Schnase J.L., Leggett J.J., Hicks D.L., Szabo R.L., Jan. 1993. “Semantic data modeling of hypermedia associations”, ACM Trans. Inf. Syst. 11, 1, pp. 27-50
  3. Tochtermann K., Dittrich G., 1995. “Towards a family of formal models for hypermerdia”, HIM'95 Proceedings, pp. 77-91
  4. Bench-Capon T., Dunne P., 1989. “Some computational properties of a model for electronic documents”, Electr. Pub.Orig.Dissem. Des.2, 4, pp. 231-256.
  5. Peckham J., Mariansky F., 1988. “Semantic data models”, ACM Comput. Surv. 20,3, pp. 153-189
  6. Abitoul S., Hull R., 1987. “IFO: a formal semantic database model”, ACM Trans. Database Syst. 12, 4
  7. Chidlovskii B., 2000. “Using Regular Tree Automata as XML Schemas”, Proceedings of the IEEE Advances in Digital Libraries 2000
  8. Schleicher A., Westfechtel B., 2001. “Beyond Stereotyping: Metamodeling Approaches for the UML”, Proceedings of the 34th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences 2001 ( HICSS-34)
  9. Schmidt H.A., Swenson J.R., 1975. “On the semantics of the relational data models”, Proceedings of the SIGMOD San Jose, Calif.
  10. Lange D., 1990. “A formal model for hypertext”, Proceedings of the NIST Hypertext Standardisation Workshop. NIST, Gaithersburg, Md., pp. 145-166
  11. Gogolla M., U. Hohenstein, 1991. “Towards a semantic view of an extended entity-relationship model”, ACM Trans. Database Syst. 16, 3, pp.369-416
  12. Chen, P.P., 1976. “The Entity-Relationship Model - Toward a Unified View of Data” ACM Transactions on Database Systems, 1976. 1(1): p. 9-36.
  13. Chen P.P., Akoka J., Kangassalo H., Thalheim B (Eds.), 1999. “Conceptual Modeling, Current Issues and Future Directions”, Selected Papers from Symposium on Conceptual Modeling, held before ER'97. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol.1565, Springer 1999.
  14. Chen P.P., 1999. “ER Model, XML and the Web” in J. Akoka, M. Bouzeghoub, I. Comyn-Wattiau, E. Métais (Eds.): Conceptual Modeling - ER 7899, 18th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling, Paris, France, Nov. 15-18, 1999, Proceedings.
  15. Jagadish H. V., Lakshmanan L. V. S., Srivastava D., and Thompson K., 2001. “TAX: A Tree Algebra for XML” In Proceedings of DBPL'01.
  16. Trastour D., Bartolini C., Preist C., 2002. “Semantic Web Support for the Business-to-Business E-Commerce Lifecycle”, Proc. of WWW2002
  17. Rada R., 1990. “Hypertext Writing and Document Reuse: The Role of a Semantic Net". Electr. Pub. Orig. Dissem. and Design, 3(3):125-140, August 1990.
  18. W3C, XML Information Set http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlinfoset/
  19. W3C, Web-Ontology http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/WebOnt/
  20. UML, Meta-Model Specification ( v1.4) http://www.rational.com/uml
  21. OMG-MOF, Meta Object Facility Specification (v1.3), http://www.omg.org, march 2000
  22. W3C, DAML + OIL
  23. http://www.w3.org/TR/daml+oil-reference
  24. W3C XPath, XML Path Language Recommendation, http://www.w3c.org/TR/xpath, Nov. 1999
Download


Paper Citation


in Harvard Style

Schuetzelhofer W. and M. Goeschka K. (2004). FORMAL SPECIFICATION AND VERIFICATION OF XML-BASED BUSINESS DOMAIN MODELS . In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Volume 3: ICEIS, ISBN 972-8865-00-7, pages 209-216. DOI: 10.5220/0002605302090216


in Bibtex Style

@conference{iceis04,
author={Wolfgang Schuetzelhofer and Karl M. Goeschka},
title={FORMAL SPECIFICATION AND VERIFICATION OF XML-BASED BUSINESS DOMAIN MODELS},
booktitle={Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Volume 3: ICEIS,},
year={2004},
pages={209-216},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0002605302090216},
isbn={972-8865-00-7},
}


in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Volume 3: ICEIS,
TI - FORMAL SPECIFICATION AND VERIFICATION OF XML-BASED BUSINESS DOMAIN MODELS
SN - 972-8865-00-7
AU - Schuetzelhofer W.
AU - M. Goeschka K.
PY - 2004
SP - 209
EP - 216
DO - 10.5220/0002605302090216