UML/OCL based design and the transition towards temporal object relational database with bitemporal data

Abstract

In software modeling, UML (Unified modeling language) receives increasing attention from designers of real-time systems in software development. The emergence of temporal database calls for new visual and efficient modeling techniques to facilitate the design of temporal objects. Even though UML is not currently equipped to manage this task, UML and extended extension offered limited means to express time-varying data and temporal constraints over the dynamic behavior of temporal objects. Therefore, the object constraint language (OCL) plays an important role in the elaboration of the correct conceptual schema that allows the definition of the restrictions and the constraints which contain the duplicate and complex expression. In this paper, we present a UML extension enriched by OCL features and Bitemporal dimension to improve the understandability of a UML/OCL model, and its ability to support the temporal attributes and their evolution. The proposed temporal UML/OCL based on Bitemporal data will be translating into their corresponding in a temporal object-Relational database for the purpose of tracking historical information with an efficient manner. An algorithm has been proposed to automate the transformation from the conceptual schema enriched by bitemporal features to temporal object relational database model by following different steps such as classifying and extracting information about classes, relationships and attributes.