a personnal contribution from the Data Model point of view

From: <louys-at-alinda.u-strasbg.fr>
Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2008 15:17:51 +0100


About automated translation from UML to XML



Dear all,

I'm just giving my 2 cents in the discussion of last month.

Our experience in this topic at CDS is close to Gerard one's: There are various tools for UML modeling each of them providing a proprietary XMI file, a kind of very verbose xml file with meta-elements defining classes, relationships, cardinality etc... Unfortunately there is no standard for these TAGS. For instance, I am using Objecteering Softeam, but it does not understand Visualparadigm directly neither MagicDraw .

My understanding is that for each XMI variant, one should try to customise a general XSL style sheet and tune it for its own modeler. To have a training set of various modeler XMI-outputs would be very useful to start with.
I will open a page on the WG DM pages where you can upload examples of XMI outputs to be used as test files.

I want to point out also that there are various ways to model classes in UML and that if we could adopt a modeling style based on the same 'good practices' as mentionned by Gerard, this would help to homogeneise our UML models and alleviate the burden in the comparison/tuning process.

About the versioning:
For the Characterisation Model, developped and stabilized along quite a   long period, we had this kind of problem. We have managed it 'by hand' but with difficulties.
Besides the XML schema, there can be other kind of serialisations, like Utype-lists derived from UML classes and their attributes, or FITS serialisation in the shape of adhoc FITS KEYWORDS . Versioning also applies to these kinds of serialisation.

What would be the overhead in using a proper versioning tool like CVS or Subversion for example? does anybody have a oneyear/two year experience about that?

Cheers, Mireille, from the Data Model group Received on 2008-02-28Z15:34:27