Rule-Based Constraints for Metadata Validation and Verification in a Multi-Vendor Environment

Abstract

This paper describes a method in which users realize the benefits of a standards-based method for capturing and evaluating verification and validation (V&V) rules within and across metadata instance documents. The method uses a natural language based syntax for the T&E metadata V&V rule set in order to abstract the highly technical rule languages to a domain-specific syntax. As a result, the domain expert can easily specify, validate and manage the specification and validation of the rules themselves. Our approach is very flexible in that under the hood, the method automatically translates rules to a host of target rule languages. We validated our method in a multi-vendor scenario involving Metadata Description Language (MDL) and Instrumentation Hardware Abstraction Language (IHAL) instance documents, user constraints, and domain constraints. The rules are captured in natural language, and used to perform V&V within a single metadata instance document and across multiple metadata instance documents.