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Management Summary

This document is to specify a

Conceptual and Physical Data Model

for a system WissDB to manage reusable software engineering results and best practices. WissDB is

–      to structure, store and index knowledge, design and black boxes containing code

–      and support the user in finding and retrieving these items in a sufficiently selective activity, role, or association related way.

WissDB, as a concept, consists of

§      a data model (= C_WissDB_DM specified in this document )

§      an application API (= C_WissDB_API )

§      and a dedicated high level storage API (= C_WissDB_DL_API )

DL_API is to be understood as an abstract DBMS with an API supporting in a best possibly way the implementation of WissDB Business Transactions.

API – is the set of all methods that can be directly invoked by WissDB applications. Each method call is designed to the effect that it could be wrapped as a Web Service.

Consequences of this design are:

§      WissDB can have presentation layers of any form, especially a web-based user interface easy to integrate into any company’s intranet.

§      Feeding knowledge (e.g. updated versions of practice instances) to WissDB is easy to automate.

§      Extracting knowledge from WissDB in an accountable, easily reproducable way is possible.

To make the use of code generators possible, the data model is specified in a notation that is both easy to parse and easy to read by humans.

The notation we use is specified in the section 5 at the end if this paper (the reader is asked to read it in parallel with section 2).

Together with this document you should have received a HTML presentation of the WissDB Entity Relationship Diagram (a file WissDB.ERD.htm easier to maintain and therefore to be used as the final reference – less important attributes may be described only there).