Vocabulary and syntax based data transformation

• US 20030088543A1
• Filed: 10/07/2002
• Published: 05/08/2003
• Est. Priority Date: 10/05/2001
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Vitria Technology Incorporated (Innovation Technology Group Incorporated)
• Original Assignee: Vitria Technology Incorporated (Innovation Technology Group Incorporated)
• Inventors: Lee, Tony Sang-min, Skeen, Marion Dale
• Granted Patent: US 7,284,196 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 707/1
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/12 Use of codes for handling textual entities
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/143 Markup, e.g. Standard Generalized Markup Language [SGML] or Document Type Definition [DTD]
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/157 using dictionaries or tables
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/242 Dictionaries
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 30/06 Buying, selling or leasing transactions
• CPC Class Codes: Y10S 707/99931 Database or file accessing

Abstract

A framework for accomplishing vocabulary-based data transformations, for interfacing systems of disparate data formats. The framework is layered to separate the terms of documents form the underlying concepts corresponding thereto. The layers include an ontology layer for defining concepts, a vocabulary layer for labeling the concepts, a specification layer that specifies the concepts and labels, and a representation layer for encoding data in conformance with the specification layer. The separation enables the relationships between existing transformations to be automatically leveraged for minimizing user input for creating new transformations.

Claims

1. A framework for accomplishing vocabulary-based data transformations, said framework comprising:

an ontology layer for defining concepts;

a vocabulary layer for labeling the concepts;

a specification layer that specifies the concepts and labels; and

a representation layer for encoding data in conformance with the specification layer.

2. A method for transforming a first document to a second document;

developing an ontology specifying the concepts of the business process;

creating a first vocabulary of terms from which the terms of the first document are taken and corresponding concepts of the ontology and a second vocabulary of terms ** in the second document and corresponding concepts of the ontology to thereby establish a relationship between the terms of the first document and the terms of the second document;

determining concepts corresponding to the terms of the first document based on the first vocabulary;

determining terms of the second document corresponding to the concepts;

converting terms of the first document to terms of the second document based on said determining steps.

3. A method as recited in claim 2, wherein said step of developing comprises assigning a unique identification value to each of the concepts.

4. A method as recited in claim 2, wherein said developing step comprises arranging plural variables in a hierarchial structure and correlating a concept to each unique combination of variable and the containment of the variable in structure.

5. A method as recited in claim 2, wherein the structure is an XML Data Dictionary.

7. A method as recited in claim 5, wherein the parsing rules are based on the first vocabulary and the generation rules are based on said second vocabulary.

6. A method for transforming a first document of a first vocabulary to a second document of a second vocabulary within a collaborative system for effecting a business process;

extracting first data by parsing at least a portion of the first in accordance with parsing rules;

determining a first concept corresponding to the first data based on the first vocabulary;

determining a second concept of the second document corresponding to the first concept;

generating second data corresponding to the second document based on generation rules.

8. A method of defining an ontology dictionaries from a specification, said method comprising:

parsing the specification to remove elements;

analyzing the parsed elements to determine concepts; and

further processing the concepts to obtain unique concepts.

9. A method of transforming a source document to a target document, said method comprising:

applying a set of resolution rules to terms of the source document to map the terms to concepts of an ontology; and

applying a set of naming rules to the concepts to map the concepts to terms of the target document.