AM Resource Schema Discussions

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The CALM AM specifications under development by our team must support all the various modeling notations/formats/schemas that are used in the typical development lifecycle. For our initial specification release this means a focus on models and modeling. Models include things like UML models of system design, use cases, and even business processes. They also include non-UML things like ER diagrams and business process models.

Since we are not chartered with the development of the languages, notations and schemas for the models, we must provide a means to generically handle most if not all model content without reaching into the details of any specific language. This implies that we need to abstract out, as high as useful, common properties of all models, or rather model elements.

To begin this discussion lets look at the following logical model (UML notation) of how a generic model element might be related to other CALM resources.

We've generalize the resource into a model element, which in this case is something as granular as a UML Component, or BPMN task. In general it is any model element that can be addressed by a unique URI (ideally permalink). A model element can reference many Links. Each link has a type and a set of key/value properties. The link also references another absolute URI which is the target of the link.

Links in this case are unidirectional.

Some thoughts from Jonathan

Comments

Since this is a uni-directional link, does it make sense to include as a property of a link a reference to a 'back link' or some other unidirectional link that when combined form a bi-directional link.

-- JimConallen - 20 Aug 2009