Tips for Success
To help you apply these ideas to your own e-business projects, I offer the following tips for success:
Your e-business vocabulary defines an agreement or contract with all related business parties. Plan its specification accordingly. Get input on requirements of all key stakeholders, using the visual models of UML to improve communication.
Define all known terms, associations, and constraints, and document their purpose, source, and usage. Do not restrict your specifications to the limited expressiveness of DTDs, or even to the expanded W3C XML Schema language. Using UML, you can capture a complete specification and then transform it to one or more XML schema languages. Documentation notes added to the UML model can be automatically transformed to annotations in the XML schema.
Create a common UML model that drives both the XML schema definition and other non-XML system components. Many systems use XML in a subset of their components, but the analysis must be done holistically.