An integrated approach to business vocabulary management, and software development

For many years companies have been doing business modeling to create activity diagrams, use cases, class diagrams etc; all with the intention to better understand and document their business processes. Others have recognized a need to use a common business vocabulary and have implemented an information bus to share information throughout the corporation. While these are valuable tasks in and of themselves, they are often performed by individuals separate from the software development team and lead to a disconnect between the efforts of modeling, vocabulary maintenance, and software development. The goal of all of these tasks is to produce quality software which meets the needs of the organization, but this can only be done by integrating and automating the tasks into a coherent software development process. Electric systems operations of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) has implemented an automated approach which takes the business models created in Rational Rose, creates XML schemas for the messages (data flows), links the messages to a corporate vocabulary (common information model, CIM), and invokes XSLT to produce a message that is understood by the agency and, in the case of the CIM, understood by the electric utility industry.