SDD support tools
Jacob Asiedu, and Robert A. Morris, University of Massachusetts at Boston Department of Computer Science, U.S.A.We discuss experience developing two SDD tools: a prototype lightweight SDD description editor implemented in C# under .NET, and an SDD debugging aide in Java. The first assumes that an SDD Terminology has been built by some community. It supports the scoring of descriptions in ways that insure only those states of a character are offered which are defined for the character in the given Terminology. (This cannot be enforced by XML Schema validation against the SDD Schema, which knows nothing about any particular Terminology.) The second tool primarily supports programmers developing SDD applications, though it might also find use by people attempting to write SDD instance document with generic editors like XML Spy or XML Notepad. It addresses the heavy dependence of SDD on Schema keys and key references. Typically these are randomly chosen integers, and it is difficult, for example in a Description, for a human to understand what is the referent in the Terminology of a given key reference. The SDD DebugRef tool chases all references in the SDD document and annotates them with a heuristically chosen indication of what the target is, and, optionally, of the full XPath from the document root to the target.