An approach to authoring and validation of Shipdex data modules

The Shipdex protocol is the international business rules developed to standardize the development and the exchange of technical and logistic data within the shipping community. Shipdex defines rules for authoring a data module in XML format which is the smallest independent information unit. In order to validate whether a data module has been generated in accordance with Shipdex protocol, it is necessary to validate the data module using a Shipdex data module verification tool. However, since Shipdex rules inherent in the tool, any modifications to Shipdex rules require update by the validation tool developer and continuous maintenance. In order to minimize such inconvenience, we propose an approach that supports authoring Shipdex data modules based on generated template files and validating data modules based on generated rules which are the Shipdex tool user writes.