XML conceptual modeling with XUML

Abstract

As XML has become the standard format for representing structured and semi-structured data on the Web, the methods for designing XML schemas is becoming more and more important. XML schemas represent the logical models of the documents. In order to design or integrate XML schemas, it is necessary to first design the conceptual structures with a proper conceptual model. We thus specify a XML conceptual model, XUML, which has following characteristics comparing with the existing XML conceptual models: 1) expressing the containment semantics more explicitly; 2) supporting the concept of Business Components; 3) specifying the data dependencies in multiple contexts. XUML is defined based on the UML2 standard, so it will be more friendly and practical for those who have had knowledge and experience on UML. Based on XUML, we further present a framework of the methodology which is dedicated to the design of XML documents and XML databases. In this paper, the focus is put on XUML.