Model-Driven Development Based Transformation of Stereotyped Class Diagrams to XML Schemas in a Healthcare Context

Abstract

Abstract. The health sector uses clinical guidelines as instruments for helping decision making. We are interested in the development of a ubiquitous decision support system (UDSS) for clinical guidelines in order to help the medical staff in their decisions and in order to record a trace of the application of the guidelines. For the development of such a system in a Model-Driven Development (MDD) setting, we propose the use of class diagrams of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) with stereotypes and eXtensible Markup Language (XML) schemas. When both languages, UML and XML, have to share a common modelling space, the necessity of transforming UML models into XML schemas arises. However, to our knowledge, previous transformation proposals do not consider the case in which some profiles have been applied to the UML model. For this reason, in this paper we propose a set of rules for translating stereotyped UML class diagrams into XML schemas, storing a trace of the application of the guideline.

Evolution of XML schemas and documents from stereotyped UML class models: A traceable approach

“…One is the approach [5,29] that we considered to be the most complete proposal regarding the UML-to-XML schema transformations. The second approach has been developed by our research group [17]. Unlike the proposal [5,29], that only transforms the stereotypes without considering their properties, our approach specifies complete transformations for UML profiles.…”

“…As for the former conclusion, our proposal in [24] is a partial solution to the traceability that maintains explicit links between the UML class models and XML schemas. Regarding the second conclusion, in [17] we developed a first version of transformation rules for the use of profiles in UML models without considering traceability.…”

“…Because of that, we concentrated on the transformation of UML class models to XML schemas, and we analyzed 22 papers grouped into 13 different categories, which provide a general vision of the various proposals. Specifically, the aim of some papers we analyzed [3][4][5][6][27][28][29][30][31] is just the definition of a UML-to-XML schema transformation, whereas other papers [17,24,[32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43] form part of more general projects and do not have this transformation as the only goal.…”

“…Besides, we have shown [16] that there are no proposals in the literature that transform UML class models in which some profile is applied. We have presented a preliminary solution [17] which is improved in this paper.…”

“…Specifically, the UML-XML evolution approach that we presented in [24] has been completed by including UML profiles. The transformation of this kind of UML construct was presented in [17], but in the present paper this process is augmented with a traceability feature. The Generic Evolution Architecture included in the present work extends our previous evolution architecture [23], devoted to the specific database context, to a more general setting.…”