Exchanging ORM Schemas using a Conceptual Mark-up Language

The internet creates a strong demand for standardized exchange not only of data itself but especially of data semantics, as this same internet increasingly becomes the carrier of e-business activity (e.g. using web services). One way to achieve this is in the form of communicating "rich" conceptual schemas. In this paper we present for this purpose an XML-based ORM-Markup language (ORM-ML). Its XML representation allows for the easy exchange of ORM schemas between agents, respecting the ORM structure of these schemas and the semantics as defined by the specified constraints. Style sheets (XSLT) for verbalization aspects, for instance, can then be used to display ORM XML documents in structured pseudo-natural language, generated from agreed parameterized templates. Other style sheets may be envisaged to convert such ORM-Markup documents into many specific formalisms and languages, such as first order logic, a business rule engine's language, the upload format for another CASE tool, etc.