Datasheet

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Chapter 1 ✦ What Is UML?
MOF supports this long-term strategy by providing
✦ The infrastructure for implementing CORBA-based design and reuse
repositories
✦ The definition for a set of CORBA IDL interfaces to define and manipulate
metamodels and the models created using them
✦ The rules for automatically generating the CORBA interfaces for metamodels,
thus insuring consistency
Common Warehouse Metamodel (CWM)
The Common Warehouse Model (CWM) was developed in cooperation with the
Meta-Data Coalition (MDC). The goal of CWM was to provide to the data modeling
community the same type of solution that UML provided to the object modeling
community. In the same way that UML describes a common modeling language for
building systems, CWM describes metadata interchange among data warehousing,
business intelligence, knowledge management, and portal technologies. Like UML,
CWM is a language derived from the MOF. CWM provides the mapping from MDA
PIMs to database schemas. CWM covers the full life cycle of designing, building,
and managing data warehouse applications and supports management of the life
cycle.
You can find the specifications for CWM at
www.omg.org/technology/documents/
formal/cwm.htm
. Two other specifications to extend CWM to the Internet are also
currently under way: CWM Web Services (
www.omg.org/techprocess/meetings/
schedule/CWM_Web_Services_RFP.html
) and CWM Metadata Interchange
Patterns (MIP) (
www.omg.org/techprocess/meetings/schedule/CWM_MIP_
RFP.html
).
XML Metadata Interchange (XMI)
At its simplest level, XMI defines a mapping from UML to XML. It defines standard
formats and Document Type Definitions (DTD) to capture UML models (and meta-
models). This makes it possible to then convert a UML model into XML, distribute
it pretty much anywhere, and then convert it back to UML. The mapping also makes
it possible to exchange UML models between tools and across platforms.
You can read more about XMI in Chapter 22.
Technically, XMI mapping uses MOF metadata, not UML. But since UML is based
on the MOF metadata, anything defined by UML is compatible with XMI mapping
features. Additional work is being done to extend XMI to support W3C-standard
XML schema.
Cross-
Reference
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