Consistency Check - OSLC

General OSLC
1

Dear all,

My name is Weslley Torres and I am a Phd Student at Eindhoven University of Technology. My supervisors are Mark van den Brand and Alexander Serebrenik, both from the same University. I am writting a paper about tools/frameworks used to manage models. I have a few questions about OSLC.

Can you please clarify whether this tool can check consistency between models? In case the answer is positive, does the consistency checking is performed between models from different domains or only between the same domain?

Finally, in case this tool can check consistency between models from different domains. Can you please specify what kind of consistency these tools provide? Bellow you can find some kind of consistency to help you answering this last question:

Behavioral inconsistencies - occur between components that request and provide services whose names and interfaces match, but whose behaviors do not.

Information Consistency - It checks if the data that can be presented on different media, remain the same regardless of how they are presented. Example of Information inconsistency would be when the distance is presented in different units without respecting the conversion calculation

Interaction inconsistencies - occur when a component’s provided operations are accessed in a manner that violates certain interaction constraints, such as the order in which the component’s operations are to be accessed.

Interface inconsistencies - happen when connected interface elements have mismatching values, terminologies or schemes.

Name inconsistencies - happen when components, connectors or services have the same name.

Refinement inconsistencies - occur between models of different abstraction levels due to the fact the some elements are suppressed/inserted to fit the corresponding abstraction level.

Requirement Consistency - It checks whether the requirements from a requirement list are related to some model element and if this relationship is valid.

Thank you in advance,

1 Like
2

Hello,

I am also a PhD student and currently researching in the field of consistency management.

Since I came across OSLC just recently, I was wondering why the question above was not answered yet: Is it not possible to clearly answer it in case of OSLC (at least the first question about whether it can support consistency checking in general)?

As far as I could find out, the OSLC standard supports some level of integration consistency due to its general concept, but cannot actively check for inconsistency (or is meant to support it for possible tool adapters), right?

1 Like
3

Hello @weslleyt, @bergemann and welcome to the forum! Sadly the first message didn’t get my attention and I only saw it when I approved the post from @bergemann.

  • OSLC is not a tool but a family of open standards for REST APIs.
  • OSLC has a Configuration Management spec that allows you to ensure consistency between models through careful config. management. It does not specify how to compare models. All OSLC APIs are designed to work across domains.

I think you should be checking particular tools and not the API standard like OSLC. Though we are open to extending the standard to cover new uses. Do you think model consistency checking be done along the dimensions you listed over generic RDF resources without custom code having to be written for every system

I think this is the right way to think about OSLC. Also, due to a high number of MAY and SHOULD statement in the specs, OSLC discourages but does not forbid developing systems that have all of the inconsistencies listed above.

Best regards,
Andrew

2 Likes