Question: RIM XMI Files

Dec 2, 2013

Question

The RIM spec has a zip containing a set of XMI files (rim0241i) presumably which contain UML data so that one can use the modeling information as a base for hl7v3 development.  I have not had a ton of luck importing and using these files - a lot of errors from the importing tools.  After some research I found this “At the moment there are several incompatibilities between different modeling tool vendor implementations of XMI, even between interchange of abstract model data. The usage of Diagram Interchange is almost nonexistent. Unfortunately this means exchanging files between UML modeling tools using XMI is rarely possible.” (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ XML_Metadata_Interchange).  So my question is how can I extract the information from these XMI files?  Is there a recommended tool to use?

Answer

These files were produced by an old version of Rational. There are plans to update to a more recent version, but even this won’t help much. The whole area of XMI support is very disappointing - it feels to me as if this was a spec that the tooling vendors were never serious about supporting: getting it right was never mission critical to any of them.

You could hand-write a transform from that version to an XMI that your tool supports (not that they really ever document that either). Alternatively, I’ve posted my working EAP file for this RIM diagram at http://www.healthintersections.com.au/rim.EAP:

 

Unfortunately, I don’t know which RIM version this is.

I don’t know if anyone can suggest a better option in the comments - has anyone ever actually done anything with these XMI files?