Automation Tools Supporting the Development of Information Standards for Complex Systems

Abstract

As information systems continue to become more complex, the data standards to support them grow in complexity as well. To meet the needs of today’s systems, not only must the standards change, but the standards development process must change as well.

Most standards development organizations still manually develop their standards. The rising complexity of information standards may soon render this approach infeasible. In the future manually developed standards will likely not meet the needs of the users. Additional reasons for automation are reducing opportunities for human error, and speeding up the consensus building process.

The higher level artifacts that structure information standards depend on the type of standard. Standards that specify basic information structures are well suited to generation of documents from UML class diagrams: we describe a freely available tool for doing so. Standards that describe particular uses for those information structures are better off starting from use cases. We describe a freely available web-based tool for creating modular use cases supporting the re-use of actors and scenarios.

By focusing on the modeling of data exchange standards and automating the process of creating the standards document directly from the model errors can be reduced, the standards development time can be decreased and the revision process is simplified. In this paper we describe how standards could be built directly from analysis artifacts.