Standards in the VIDE Project

The standards relevant to the project can be assigned into the following categories:

Below we list the main standards identified as belonging to the first of the above categories - that is - to the initial selection of standards to which the VIDE is intended to comply.

UML 2

Unified Modeling Language is a specification language for object modelling defined at the OMG. UML2 Action Semantics is an essential part of UML 2.0 for the VIDE project. The inclusion of the action programming elements into the UML reflect the intent to make it possible to provide a complete and precise imperative-style specification of software behaviour already at the level of platform-independent model. Theoretically, this opens the way for the most challenging flavour of applying the Model Driven Architecture (MDA) principles - namely, the one often called "executable modelling", which assumes:

Those aims have not yet been effectively achieved in the area of business, data intensive applications. VIDE project will research the issues of applying a strict MDA approach to this kind of applications. One of the challenges is to bring the relevant elements of UML on the appropriate level of precision - to remove any ambiguities considering the data structures and the details of behaviour implied by the UML models.

Apart from that, in the course of the project a concrete (textual and visual) syntax for UML Actions and a part of UML Activities units will be proposed. The syntax is intended to complement the existing standardized UML notation to provide a complete and highly intuitive means of specifying a complete behaviour of the system.

MOF

Meta-Object Facility is standard for Model Driven Engineering, proposed by the OMG. MOF provides a meta-meta-model at the top layer and means to create and manipulate models and meta-models. There are two relevant versions of this standard, MOF 1.4 (Object Management Group 2002) and MOF 2.0 (Object Management Group 2004). The MOF can be important for VIDE as the foundation of standard-compliant model exchange. This requirement is however dependent on the level of adoption of the standard in the industry.

OCL

The Object Constraint Language statements serve as the most precise means of model specification within the UML and MOF model and meta-model definitions. For that purpose OCL was defined to be able to express constraints for any kind of UML elements. OCL moreover provides means to express any (first-order) query on some instance of a UML class diagram. Although the behaviour specification of in VIDE is not intended to be based on constraints, the OCL plays significant role in the project since it has been chosen as the mean to provide UML behaviour elements with the capabilities of a query language.

As far as we know, the use of OCL as a platform-independent query language for data intensive applications (to query the M0 level objects of the OMG metalevel architecture), although anticipated in the OCL specification, has not been implemented so far. It is therefore, is a novel and rather unique, thus challenging, effort of the VIDE project.

BPMN

Business Process Modelling Notation. The OMG standard BPMN provides a notation that is understandable by business users, including business analysts (creating the initial drafts of the processes), the technical developers (responsible for implementing the technology that will perform those processes), and the business people (who will manage and monitor those processes).

VIDE project is to address the business process modelling, to join the software model with the business-oriented view. The integration is intended to achieve traceability between the business process view and the application modelled at the platform-independent level.