The United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT) envisions seamless information exchange between business partners in electronic commerce. Therefore, UN/CEFACT provides the UML Profile for Core Components for the definition of document models based on UML class diagrams. Having used this approach for three years in practice, it became evident that managing document model versions is a prerequisite for successfully utilizing Core Components. While managing software versions in the area of Software Engineering is well understood and successfully applied in industrial projects, the direct application of the same techniques for versioning models is conditionally appropriate. In this research abstract we propose to combine techniques from traditional Software Configuration Management with the concepts of reference modeling, where similar problems are addressed in a different context.

Exchanging structured business documents is inevitable for successful collaboration in electronic commerce. A prerequisite, for fostering the interoperability between business partners utilizing different business document standards, is a mapping between different standards. However, the effort involved in creating those mappings is hard to estimate. For example, the complexity of standardized formats is one crucial aspect affecting the effort of the mapping process. Therefore, a notion of complexity is desirable for both, manual as well as automatic mapping processes. For this reason we develop an initial set of metrics, based on well established metrics for XML Schema, allowing to analyze the complexity of business document standards. Having such metrics at hand allows estimating the complexity and hence the mapping effort of a business document standard, prior to the actual mapping process. We demonstrate the complexity metrics on three different business document standards from the electronic commerce domain.

Assertions are recognized in the industry to be a major improvement in functional RTL verification flows. Today's standard assertion languages, such as SVA [1] and PSL [2], are very expressive, capable of describing sophisticated temporal design behavior at different abstraction levels. Nevertheless, most assertion users stick to writing simple assertions because of the intricacy and effort required to debug complex assertions -- one of the major bottlenecks in assertion based verification. We present debugging and diagnosis techniques that automatically identify those parts of an assertion that cause the assertion to fail for a given design and that provide additional automation to efficiently identify the root cause of the failure. These techniques enable major effort savings when working with complex assertions, allowing engineers to use the full capabilities of assertion languages. This enables further productivity and quality improvements in functional verification by lifting mainstream assertion usage to higher abstraction levels such as efficient capture and verification of high-level design features, operations, and transactions. Advanced debugging automation is key for this progress - solving a problem that many designers and verification engineers face in their daily work.