A Trace Metamodel Proposal Based on the Model Driven Architecture Framework for the Traceability of User Requirements in Data Warehouses - Advanced Information Systems Engineering - page 127

different shape. In this case, the designer will decide which derived element
is the correct solution to the conflict.
- Rationalization links will be included as means of enabling the user to record
his own annotations in the trace model about changes or decisions taken.
Once we have defined our trace metamodel, we need to define an approach to
create the trace models in an automatic way, which models will be created and
what information will they store. In order to include traceability in our ap-
proach [15, 16], we will introduce the trace models shown in figure 4. The first
step to include traceability and support for automated operations (like require-
ments and transformation validation, calculation of traceability measures and
derivation including source datatypes) in our approach, is to make the relation-
ships (shown in [15, 16]) between the CIM and PIM elements explicit. This is
a vertical traceability (source and target models are in a different MDA layer)
case in which all the relations are perfectly known, since they are created in an
automatic way, so we just need to create the elements which correspond to the
traces simultaneously as the transformation is executed and the target model is
created. This CIM2PIMTrace model will be storing mainly Satisfiability traces.
The second step,is to be able to record the traces between the data sources
represented in the PSM and the hybrid PIM. The hybrid PIM is the result of
a transformation using as input the first PIM (from now on “initial PIM”) and
the data sources. The hybrid PIM should be traced both to the initial PIM, in
order to be able to trace the original requirements, and to the data sources, in
order to keep track of the source tables and attributes. This hybrid PIM can
contain conflicts between concepts that come from both the requirements and
from the data sources, either defining the same concept differing only in their
name (overlap) or totally differing both in name and attributes (conflict). In
this sense, this hybrid PIM will have both vertical (between the data sources
and the hybrid PIM, DS2PIMTrace) and horizontal (between the initial PIM
and the hybrid PIM, PIM2PIMTrace1) traceability models. The vertical trace
Fig. 4. Inclusion of traceability models in DW development process