Re: Mapping a UML model to a DTD or Schema

[Dave Carlson <dcarlson@ontogenics.com>]

I'm behind on reading mail lists and only discovered this thread today.  As
Curt pointed out, I've recently finished a book on exactly this subject, so
obviously I have an opinion here :-)  The book is currently being typeset
by Addison-Wesley.  About 50% of the book deals directly with the topic of
mapping UML class diagrams to both DTDs and XML Schemas.  The mapping is
based on XMI specifications, but expanded for more designer control.

This mapping is part of a broader topic of analysis and design of XML
vocabularies, plus their deployment in B2B applications and portals.  So,
yes Robin, my focus is on conceptual modeling directed at the practical
needs of systems analysts, designers, and architects.  As Ken North pointed
out, I'll be presenting a tutorial in this subject at XML DevCon in New
York.  That presentation will use a product catalog vocabulary as the
design task.

I've recently posted an updated white paper, based on the presentation that
I did at XML Developer's Day in December.  In this example, I manually
reverse-engineered the UDDI schema into UML, then auto-generated an XML
Schema that successfully validates an XML document queried from Microsoft's
UDDI repository.  I chose this example because it tests many of the mapping
stereotypes necessary to reproduce an equivalent UDDI schema.  See:
    http://XMLModeling.com/examples/uddi

This white paper does not describe the complete set of mapping rules and
UML stereotypes, although many are used in the example.  I'm in the process
of writing up a more complete description (it's also included as an
Appendix in the book).

I've developed a Web-based tool that implements these mapping rules.  I'm
still fine-tuning it and testing for scalability, but expect to announce
its general availability soon.  With this tool, you can use any UML tool
that exports/saves to XMI 1.0 (e.g. Rational Rose or Argo), then upload
that XMI file to my server and browse/transform the model interactively.
I'm also starting to prototype a transformation from UML to RELAX.

I became interested in this topic more than 2 years ago, because graphical
diagrams of system analysis have proved useful many times in my consulting
work over the past 10+ years using object-oriented technology.  In the case
of the UDDI schema, I find the UML model to be infinitely easier to
understand than reading the UDDI specification...

Regards,
  Dave Carlson

----- Original Message -----
From: "Robin Cover" <robin@isogen.com>
To: "XML-DEV Discussion" <xml-dev@lists.xml.org>
Cc: "Francesco Ricci" <ricci@itc.it>; "Ken North"
<ken_north@compuserve.com>
Sent: Thursday, January 25, 2001 1:42 AM
Subject: Re: Mapping a UML model to a DTD or Schema


> >> Maybe is a naive question but I'd like to know if there are
> >> standard approaches to map a UML class diagram to a DTD or Schema.
> >
> > [Ken North]
> > FYI, Dave Carlson, Kevin Kelly and Peter Chen are scheduled to
> > do conceptual modeling sessions in April at XML DevCon 2001.
>
> It's encouraging to hear mention of "conceptual modeling" in
> connection with Web/markup conferences; especially heart-warming
> to hear "conceptual modeling" and "schema design" in the
> same sentence.  My guess is that the syntax-centric
> stranglehold will not be broken until there's a conscious focus
> on conceptual modeling, accompanied by an unspoken agreement
> that XML schemas and other markup syntaxes can readily be
> generated from conceptual model notations.
>