a personnal contribution from the Data Model point of view

[louys at alinda.u-strasbg.fr]

About automated translation from UML to XML
--------------------------------------------
Dear all,

I'm just giving my 2 cents in the discussion of last month.

Our experience in this topic at CDS is close to Gerard one's:
There are various tools for UML modeling each of them providing a 
proprietary XMI file, a kind of very verbose xml file with 
meta-elements defining classes, relationships, cardinality etc...
Unfortunately there is no standard for these TAGS.
For instance, I am using Objecteering Softeam, but it does not 
understand Visualparadigm directly neither MagicDraw .

My understanding is that for each XMI variant, one should try to 
customise a general XSL style sheet and tune it for its own modeler.
To have a training set of various modeler XMI-outputs would be very 
useful to start with.
I will open a page on the WG DM pages where you can upload examples of XMI
outputs to be used as test files.

I want to point out also that there are various ways to model classes 
in UML and that if we could adopt a modeling style based on the same 
'good practices' as mentionned by Gerard, this would help to 
homogeneise our UML models and alleviate the burden in the 
comparison/tuning process.

About the versioning:
For the Characterisation Model, developped and stabilized along quite a 
  long period, we had this kind of problem. We have managed it 'by 
hand' but with difficulties.
Besides the XML schema, there can be other kind of serialisations, like 
Utype-lists derived from UML classes and their attributes, or FITS 
serialisation in the shape of adhoc FITS KEYWORDS . Versioning also 
applies to these kinds of serialisation.

What would be the overhead in using a proper versioning tool like CVS 
or Subversion for example? does anybody have a oneyear/two year 
experience about that?

Cheers, Mireille, from the Data Model group