A Graphical Conceptual Model for Conventional and Time-varying JSON Data

Today, although there is an increasing interest in temporal JSON instance documents, since they allow tracking data changes, recovering past data versions, and executing temporal queries, there is no support (data model, modelling language, method, or tool) for conceptual modelling of temporal JSON data. Moreover, even though there are some graphical editors to build JSON Schemata (like JSON Schema Editor of Altova), they do not provide any built-in support for modelling temporal aspects of JSON data. Therefore, designers of JSON-based NoSQL data stores are proceeding in an ad hoc manner when they have to model some temporal requirements. To fill this theoretical and practical gap, we propose in this paper a graphical conceptual model for time-varying JSON data, named Temporal JSON Conceptual Model (TempoJCM). To this purpose, first we define a graphical conceptual model for conventional (i.e., non temporal) JSON data, called JSON Conceptual Model (JCM), and then we extend it to support modelling of temporal aspects of JSON data. TempoJCM facilitates conceptual modelling of both conventional and temporal JSON data, in a graphical and user-friendly manner. An editor supporting TempoJCM is planned to become the user interface for temporal JSON schema design in the tauJSchema framework.