Detecting operations that potentially violate well-formedness constraints for metadata repository systems

The organization of the metadata in repository systems exhibits a complex structure which is layered, multi-level and dynamically adaptable; the validating of well-formedness constraints is insufficiently specified in existing repository system standard, the above two reasons make it becomes a major challenge how to validate well-formedness constraints for MOF-based metadata repository systems. In this paper we propose a method to automatically detect the operations that may potentially violate a well-formedness constraint in the meta-level. Our approach can detect potentially violating operations by determining the construction actions that may violate the constraint and checking whether those actions appear in the operation specification. Our approach helps to improve efficiency of well-formedness constraint checking since its results can be used to discard many irrelevant tests.