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Standards are widely-used in the computer science and IT industry. Different organizations like the International Organization for Standardization (SO) are involved in the development of computer related standards. An important domain of standardization is the specification of data formats enabling the exchange of information between different applications. Such formats can be expressed in a variety of schema languages thereby defining sets of conformant documents. Often the use of multiple schema languages is required due to their varying expressive power and different kind of validation requirements.rnThis also holds for the Specification Common Cartridge which is maintained by the IMS Global Learning Consortium. The specification defines valid zip packages that can be used to aggregate different learning objects. These learning objects are represented by a set of files which are a part of the package and can be imported into a learning management system. The specification makes use of other specifications to constrain the contents of valid documents. Such documents are expressed in the eXtensible Markup Language and may contain references to other files also part of the package. The specification itself is a so-called domain profile. A domain profile allows the modification of one or more specifications to meet the needs of a particular community. Test rules can be used to determine a set of tasks in order to validate a concrete package. The execution is done by a testsystem which, as we will show, can be created automatically. Hence this method may apply to other package based data formats that are defined as a part of a specification.
This work will examine the applicability of this generic test method to the data formats that are introduced by the so called Virtual Company Dossier. These formats are used in processes related to public e-procurement. They allow the packaging of evidences that are needed to prove the fulfillment of criteria related to a public tender. The work first examines the requirements that are common to both specifications. This will introduce a new view on the requirements by introducing a higher level of abstraction. The identified requirements will then be used to create different domain profiles each capturing the requirements of a package based data format. The process is normally guided by supporting tools that ease the capturing of a domain profile and the creation of testsystems. These tools will be adapted to support the new requirements. Furtheron the generic testsystem will be modified. This system is used as a basis when a concrete testsystem is created.
Finally the author comes to a positive conclusion. Common requirements have been identified and captured. The involved systems have been adapted allowing the capturing of further types of requirements that have not been supported before. Furthermore the background of the specifications quite differ. This indicates that the use of domain profiles and generic test technologies may be suitable in a wide variety of other contexts.