A UML Profile for Core Components and their Transformation to XSD

In business-to-business e-commerce, traditional electronic data interchange (EDI) approaches such as UN/EDIFACT have been superseded by approaches like web services and ebXML. Nevertheless, a precise and common semantic definition of business documents exchanged is needed. In order to become independent from a transfer syntax, we prefer defining the documents as platform independent models. An approach that follows this idea is the UN/CEFACT´s core component standard. Core components are reusable semantic building blocks which can be combined in various ways to create shared libraries of interoperable business documents. In order to use standard UML modeling tools we have developed a UML profile for the core components standard. Furthermore, we adapt the UN/CEFACT naming and design rules for the UML profile in order to derive XML schemas for business document exchanges. The overall approach is demonstrated by using a specific example from the field of e-commerce.