Modeling imprecise requirements with XML

Fuzzy theory is suitable to capture and analyze the informal requirements that are imprecise in nature, meanwhile, XML is emerging as one of the dominant data formats for data processing on the internet. In this paper, we have developed a fuzzy object-oriented modeling technique (FOOM) schema based on XML to model requirements specifications and incorporated the notion of stereotype to facilitate the modeling of imprecise requirements. FOOM schema is also transformed into a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) in an automatic manner. A schema graph is proposed to serve as an intermediate representation for the structure of FOOM schema to bridge the FOOM schema and APIs for both content validation and data access for the XML documents. q 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.