Understanding Constraint Expressions in Large Conceptual Schemas by Automatic Filtering

Abstract

Human understanding of constraint expressions (also called schema rules) in large conceptual schemas is very difficult. This is due to the fact that the elements (entity types, attributes, relationship types) involved in an expression are defined in different places in the schema, which may be very distant from each other and embedded in an intricate web of irrelevant elements. The problem is insignificant when the conceptual schema is small, but very significant when it is large. In this paper we describe a novel method that, given a set of constraint expressions and a large conceptual schema, automatically filters the conceptual schema, obtaining a smaller one that contains the elements of interest for the understanding of the expressions. We also show the application of the method to the important case of understanding the specification of event types, whose constraint expressions consists of a set of pre and postconditions. We have evaluated the method by means of its application to a set of large conceptual schemas. The results show that the method is effective and efficient. We deal with conceptual schemas in UML/OCL, but the method can be adapted to other languages.