An object-oriented and XML-based framework for modeling and representing mobile-commerce application information

Abstract

With the requirement of complexity and diversification of today’s computer applications, more and more types of information are included in an application, and this is especially true in an m-commerce application. In many cases, user information, context information and content information are all included in a single m-commerce application. These three types of information are substantially different in many aspects. It is then critical for such an application to employ suitable techniques to effectively model and represent such information. The research proposes an Object-Oriented (O-O) and XML-based framework to unify the information. Firstly, the framework extracts the information outside the application. Based on the extracted information, the O-O class diagram is used for information modeling. With the extracted information and the class diagram, the framework then automatically converts the information to an XML format. The proposed framework significantly eliminates the human intervention when converting the useful information to an XML representation, which facilitates the exchanges of different types of information and also brings the flexibility and extensibility to accommodate new possible types of information.