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Mapping ORM to TGraph
(2017)
Object Role Modeling (ORM) is a semantic modeling language used to describe objects and their relations amongst each other. Both objects and relations may be subject to rules or ORM constraints.
TGraphs are ordered, attributed, typed and directed graphs. The type of a TGraph and its components, the edges and vertices, is defined using the schema language graph UML (grUML), a profiled version of UML class diagrams. The goal of this thesis is to map ORM schemas to grUML schemas in order to be able to represent ORM schema instances as TGraphs.
Up to this point, the preferred representation for ORM schema instances is in form of relational tables. Though mappings from ORM schemas to relational schemas exist, those publicly available do not support most of the constraints ORM has to offer.
Constraints can be added to grUML schemas using the TGraph query language GReQL, which can efficiently check whether a TGraph validates the constraint or not. The graph library JGraLab provides efficient implementations of TGraphs and their query language GReQL and supports the generation of grUML schemas.
The first goal of this work is to perform a complete mapping from ORM schemas to grUML schemas, using GReQL to sepcify constraints. The second goal is to represent ORM instances in form of TGraphs.
This work gives an overview of ORM, TGraphs, grUML and GReQL and the theoretical mapping from ORM schemas to grUML schemas. It also describes the implementation of this mapping, deals with the representation of ORM schema instances as TGraphs and the question how grUML constraints can be validated.