Compile time semantic analysis and verification of conceptual models in application to transactional business information systems

Abstract

Conceptual modeling of information systems is an approach to systems analysis and design that is widely-used in the field of software engineering. Its aim is to obtain a description of the general knowledge that an information system needs to know, which is called a conceptual schema. Although, the information about a conceptual schema is widely used by various technologies in a programmatic way for automation of error-prone software engineering tasks, there is a lack of refined metamodeling facilities that provide domain discoverability at design time. This forces software engineers to turn to awkward ways of representing metadata, which results in unreliable systems with limited evolvability. In this work, we develop a technology for compile time semantic analysis that captures the description of a conceptual schema in a form of metadata modeled in the source code. We focus on the Java programming language in particular, taking advantage of its annotation processing capabilities. We provide our implementation in the context of a particular framework – Trident Genesis. As a means of evaluation we employ an approach of qualitative research by conducting an experiment targeted at a focus group of software engineers. We demonstrate that our findings indicate a definitive improvement in domain discoverability, system reliabilty and evolvability. The core principles of the presented implementation lay the groundwork for the development of a general metamodeling abstraction.