TRANSFORMING UML-ACTIVITY DIAGRAMS INTO IMS- LEARNING DESIGN MANIFESTS USING XMI AND XSL José R. Hilera, Luis De-Marcos, José M. Gutiérrez, S. Otón, Roberto Barchino, Eva García, José A. Gutiérrez, José J. Martínez, Antonio García Department of Computer Science, University of Alcalá, Alcalá de Henares (Madrid) - Spain ABSTRACT This paper presents XSL source code to automatically produce a Unit of Learning manifest with a standard IMS-LD format, from the activity diagram with UML format that represents its workflow. Besides, a complementary XSL source code that performs the reverse process, namely to automatically obtain the activity diagram from the unit of learning manifest, is presented; so re-engineering of learning processes is also facilitated. KEYWORDS Learning design, IMS-LD, UML, Activity diagram, XMI, XSLT. 1. DESCRIPTION The process for transforming models outlined in figure 1 has been implemented. An UML (OMG, 2009) modeling tool is used to create an activity diagram of the course that is going to be designed; and then the diagram is exported to a XMI (OMG, 2007) file, generating a course.xmi file. Next, a XSLT (W3C, 1999) transformation engine parses the code specified in the file UMLtoLD.xsl (excerpt in table 1 left), generating the imsmanifest.xml file of the unit of work. This later file is then integrated in the package generated by the IMS-LD (IMS, 2003) editor (course.zip) when the designing process of the unit of work has concluded. Reverse transformation is similar. In this case the transformation sheet LDtoUML.xsl, which is complementary to the previous one, is employed (excerpt in table 1 right). Figure 1. Transforming UML and IMS-LD models As it can be observed in table 1 left, the code loops through the input UML document locating those that represent activities (“uml:CallOperationAction” in this simple code, but it can be extended checking other possible labels representing simple activities or actions, as “uml:CallBehaviorAction” or, in general, “uml:ActivityNode”), generating the corresponding activities of the IMS-LD document in the required output format. Then activity structures (<activity-structure> nodes) that represent the concatenation of activities, using sequences or alternative paths, are generated. Due to space restrictions the complete source code cannot be included but it is accessible at www.cc.uah.es/hilera/sw/uml_ld.zip. In the complementary transformation (table 1 right), activity-structures are located in the input file and a new UML “CallOperationAction” node is ISBN: 978-972-8939-38-0 © 2011 IADIS 422