Authors:
Wolfgang Schuetzelhofer
1
and
Karl M. Goeschka
2
Affiliations:
1
IBM Austria, Austria
;
2
Vienna University of Technology, Austria
Keyword(s):
Semantic meta model, Business domain model, Graph theory, Constraint modeling, XML language
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Enterprise Information Systems
;
Information Engineering Methodologies
;
Information Systems Analysis and Specification
;
Modeling Concepts and Information Integration Tools
;
Modeling Formalisms, Languages and Notations
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 bu
t 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.
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