Modeling imprecise requirements with XML
Introduction
One of the foci of the recent developments in object-oriented modeling (OOM) has been the extension of OOM to fuzzy logic to capture informal requirements that are imprecise in nature (see Ref. [10] for a survey on fuzzy object-oriented model). Meanwhile, XML is emerging as one of the dominant data formats for data processing on the Internet [20]. XML is rapidly establishing itself as the metagrammar for interorganizational communication and becoming increasingly urgent that requirements analysts, system designer and software developers be able to: (1) model the information represented in XML, and (2) describe the relationships between the XML and the systems to process it.
In this paper, we propose (an overview of our approach is depicted in Fig. 1):
• To define a fuzzy object-oriented modeling technique (FOOM) [11] schema for modeling the FOOM requirements specifications in XML format: as a continuation of our previous work in using fuzzy logic as a basis for formulating imprecise requirements [12], we have extended FOOM along two dimensions:
- 1.
To define the FOOM schema for constructing requirements specifications, and for validating the model: the FOOM schema is defined based on the key features described in FOOM, including fuzzy set, fuzzy attribute, fuzzy rule, and fuzzy association, by using the XML schema; and
- 2.
To incorporate the notion of stereotypes in FOOM to facilitate the modeling of imprecise requirement: we extend the FOOM by incorporating three kinds of stereotype: entity, control, and interface. In addition, we also add a new stereotype, fuzzy entity to better describe the semantics of imprecise requirements.
We chose the meeting schedule problem [23] as an example throughout this paper to illustrate the proposed approach.
The organization of this paper is as follow. We first introduce the background on XML and XML schema in Section 2. In Section 3, the mappings of FOOM to XML schema and to XML documents are discussed. Several kinds of fuzziness in fuzzy objects are identified, and an extension of FOOM with stereotypes is also described. In Section 4, we propose a schema graph as an intermediate representation for an XML schema, and algorithms for transforming the XML schema into a set of APIs especially for performing the structure and content validation and data access of XML documents. The implementation of FOOM prototype is briefly described in Section 5. Related works are discussed in Section 6, and concluding remarks are given in Section 7.
Section snippets
Extensible markup language (XML)
XML [4] is a data description language standardized by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). XML is a sophisticated subset of SGML, and designed to describe document data using arbitrary tags. One of the goals of XML is to be suitable for use on the Web. As its name implies, extensibility is a key feature of XML; users or applications are free to declare and use their own tags and attributes. Therefore, XML ensures that both the logical structure and content of semantics rich information are
Mapping fuzzy object oriented model to XML schema
FOOM [11] is a modeling approach to analyzing imprecise requirements which extends the traditional OOM along several dimensions: (1) to extend a class to a fuzzy class which classifies objects with similar properties, (2) to encapsulate fuzzy rules in a class to describe the relationship between attributes, (3) to evaluate fuzzy class memberships by considering both static and dynamic properties, and (4) to model uncertain fuzzy associations between classes.
Transforming an XML schema to APIs
In this section, we will discuss the transformation from FOOM schema into a set of content validation and data access APIs through a schema graph. The schema graph is an extension of DTD graph [17] with typing information to serve as an intermediate representation for describing the structure of an XML schema.
Implementation
We adopted Java as the programming language for the FOOM prototype (see Fig. 15). In this prototype, a user can use the UML-like notation [3], [15] to model and document user's requirements with a specific XML schema (i.e. FOOM schema). Basic notations of FOOM (e.g. class, relationship, fuzzy-AKO, fuzzy-ISA, etc.) are provided for describing the specification. The user can construct the object/class diagram and specify the internal characteristics (e.g. fuzzy constraints, fuzzy rules,
Related work
XML is a data format for structured document interchange on the Web. It provides a framework for tagging structured data by allowing developers to define an unlimited set of tags to bring great flexibility. In general, XML serves three different sorts of role in the extant approaches:
Conclusion
In this paper, we have proposed: (1) defining the FOOM schema for modeling the FOOM requirements specifications in XML format, as well as incorporating the notion of stereotypes to facilitate the modeling of imprecise requirements; and (2) transforming the FOOM schema into a set of APIs through the use of the schema graph as an intermediate representation for content validation and data access in an automatic manner.
In our approach, the FOOM schema provides a useful representation for modeling
Acknowledgements
We thank Mr. Ying-Yan Lin for his help in implementing the prototype. This research is supported by National Science Council (Taiwan) under grants NSC90-2213-E-008-031 and NSC91-2213-E-008-012.
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