Applying Model-Driven Approach to Building Rapid Distributed Data Services

Abstract

The globalization of commerce has increased the importance of retrieving and updating complex and distributed information efficiently. Web services currently show that the most promise for building distributed application systems and model-driven architecture is a new approach to developing such applications. The expanding scale and complexity of enterprise information systems (EISs) under distributed computing environments has made sharing and exchanging data particularly challenging. Data services are applications tailored specifically for information oriented tasks to deal with business service requirements, and are heavily dependent on the distributed architecture of consumer data processing. The implementation of a data service can eliminate inconsistency among various application systems in the exchange of data. This paper proposes a data-oriented model-driven developmental framework to deal with these issues, in which a platform independent model (PIM) is divided into a service model, a logic data model, and a service composition model. We also divide a platform specific model (PSM) into a physical data model and a data service model. In this development method, we define five meta-models and outline a set of rules governing the transformation from PIMs into PSMs. A code generator is also included to transform each PSM into the application code. We include a case study to demonstrate the feasibility and merits of the proposed development framework with a case study.