An UML-XML-RDB Model Mapping Solution for Facilitating Information Standardization and Sharing in Construction Industry

Abstract

Abstract:To facilitate information standardization and sharing in Construction Industry, this paper presents a simple but effective approach that maps the UML (Unified Modeling Language) object-oriented information model related to a construction project to an XML schema, then to a Relational DataBase (RDB) schema. First of all, the mapping between UML model and XML schema is discussed since UML has been a popular tool to model the static structure and dynamic behaviors of the information and processes in a construction project, while XML has become a de-facto standard for information sharing and exchange. Then, a set of consistent rules for mapping from XML schema to RDB's Entity-Relational (E-R) model are studied and established since RDB has been the most popular choice for information management. The present study focuses on making the set of rules simple and easy-to-implement for most applications in construction industry. Finally, a mapping tool for automatically generating RDB schemas from XML Schemas is developed.

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

“…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.…”