Tips for Success
To help you when applying these ideas to your own e-business projects, I offer the following tips for success:
Plan for conceptual models of your business vocabularies that are reusable in several different deployment contexts, such as W3C XML Schema, DTD, relational DBMS, Java or EJB, etc. Alternative UML profiles can be used to transform the common business model to alternative platforms. But be aware that full realization of this goal is beyond the capabilities of many current UML tools.
Preexisting UML models might be specialized to their deployment platform, platform libraries, and datatypes (Java, .NET, and so on). Isolate the platform-independent domain model to enable its reuse and to generate XML schemas for data interchange.
Use consistent modeling guidelines for naming and structure, both within a single vocabulary and across a set of related models. For example, the FpML architecture specification provides clear guidelines for writing DTDs that are easily transferred to UML models or any other object-oriented framework.