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Toward tractable instantiation of conceptual data models using non-semantics-preserving model transformations

Published: 02 June 2014 Publication History

Abstract

As a bridge from informal business requirements to precise specifications, conceptual models serve a critical role in the development of enterprise systems. Instantiating conceptual models with test data can help stakeholders validate the model and provide developers with a test database to validate their code. ORM is a popular conceptual modeling language due in part to its expressive constraint language. Due to that expressiveness, instantiating an arbitrary ORM model is NP-hard. Smaragdakis et al. identified a subset of ORM called ORM− that can be instantiated in polynomial time. However, ORM− excludes several constraints commonly used in commercial models. Recent research has extended ORM− through semantics-preserving transformations. We extend the set of ORM models that can be transformed to ORM− models by using a class of non-semantics-preserving transformations called constraint strengthening. We formalize our approach as a special case of Stevens’ model transformation framework. We discuss an example transformation and its limitations, and we conclude with a proposal for future research.

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cover image ACM Conferences
MiSE 2014: Proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Modeling in Software Engineering
June 2014
64 pages
ISBN:9781450328494
DOI:10.1145/2593770
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New York, NY, United States

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Published: 02 June 2014

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Author Tags

  1. ORM
  2. databases
  3. model transformation
  4. test data generation

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