Semantic Checking of Business Document

Introduction

There are two user roles in this project, Customer and Vendor. The customer defines Test Cases which consist of Constraint Specifications and/or Schema Extensions. The current prototype only has Constraint Specification capability implemented. The vendor then uses the Test Cases created by the customer to check a business document. There are also two checking modes, Manual and Automatic. The manual checking is done by a person manually selecting a test case and posting the business document. The automatic checking requires the vendor to first create a vendor profile, in which he associates each interested business document specification with a test case. Note that the mapping of business document specification to a test case is called a Test Entry.

The Constraint Specification is encoded using Schematron. Schematron works very well with DTD, since it does not require a reference schema. What schematron does is checking the XML elements in the document with respect to the rules. The interested XML elements and the associated rules are specified in the schematron using XPATH syntax.

Follow the procedures below to use the testbed.

Create a New Customer Profile and Test Cases

Start from the 1st step if you have not create your customer profile; otherwise, start from the 2nd step.
*** If you use the browser's Back button, you may encounter errors. If that happens, start with the Login in the 2nd step.***

1. Create a Customer Profile. After the new profile is created, you will be directed the Customer Profile Page. Follow step 3.
2. Login to the Customer Profile page.
3. Click the 'Add Test Case' button to create a new test case. Follow the instruction on the pages to fill out information. Leave the Schema Extension field blank. Hit the 'Submit Schema Extension' button.
4. If there is no error, the next page prompts for the constraint specification. You can copy and paste the Show_shipment.scmt as an example constraint specification. Hit the 'Submit Constraint Specification' button. Another example is the Acknowledge_delivery.scmt
5. Hit 'Confirm' to create the test case and 'Cancel' to discard. If there is no error, this bring you back to the Customer Profile page where the new Test Case and any existing ones are shown alphabetically with respect to the test case name.

Manual Checking

Follow the steps on the Manually Check Document page to check the document. It asks you to do the followings:

1. Select the profile of customer you would like to work with.
2. Select a test case.
3. Post the content to be checked. You may use this Lockheed Martin 161_show_shipment_005.xml BOD as an example document to check against the constraint specification given above. Note that you may need to use Browser's 'View Source' or 'Save'. You can also try correcting it and check again. Another example is the 196_acknowledge_delivery_001.xml BOD.

Automatic Checking

1. To be continued.

Architecture

You can view UML model of the implementation here.

Technical Contact: Serm Kulvatunyou
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