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<a name="status"></a>
  <h2 class="title">
    ActiveFacts Project Status
  </h2>

  <h4>Constellation Query Language</h4>

  <p>
  The Constellation Query Language implementation available in
  version 0.8.5 compiles all features of ORM2 implemented by NORMA
  with only minuscule differences. Entity Types, Value Types, Fact
  Types (including objectified), Reference Modes, and all types of
  constraints - Value and Role Value Constraints, Presence
  Constraints (which covers Mandatory, Uniqueness, and Frequency
  constraints), Subset, Equality, Exclusion, Mandatory Exclusion,
  and Ring constraints.
  </p>
  
  <p> At this version Terms (object type names) may not contain
  spaces.  Terms may not appear in readings (unless in lower-case)
  and readings may only contain single adjectives (hyphen-binding).
  Deontic constraints are recognised using the annotation (otherwise
  <b>action</b>). Join Constraints may also be defined beyond those
  available in NORMA.  Example data may be declared.  </p>

  <p>
  This version provides functionality not available in NORMA. Additions
  include:
  </p>
  <ul>
  <li> Business Context Notes, which are annotations indicating why a
      particular modeling construct was used, and who approved that.
  </li>
  <li> Definition of Units using conversion formulae.  A library of
      500 standard unit conversions is provided.  </li>
  <li> Value Types may be defined to utilise those units. </li>
  </ul>

  <p>
  New features are being developed for an upcoming 0.9.0 release:
  </p>
  <ul>
  <li> Multi-word terms, and multiple adjectives.
  <li> Improvements on the use of the hyphen to allow hyphenated words in readings.
  <li> Term Synonyms
  <li> Imported vocabularies (including multi-lingual versioning)
  <li> Improved model validation
  </ul>

  <p>
  Beyond that, the query syntax will be completed and queries will be generated
  to SQL.
  </p>

  <h4>Constellation Query Language generators</h4>

  <p>
  The CQL generator allows conversion of NORMA files. At the present release,
  deontic constraints and example fact populations are not emitted.
  </p>

  <p>
  The Ruby generator is functional. Not all constraints are emitted to Ruby yet,
  but any combination of facts allowed by the vocabulary may be represented.
  </p>
  
  <p>
  The SQL generators are generating correct and useful SQL, using a relational
  mapping algorithm that produces similar results to NORMA. This algorithm will
  be extended to emit more constraints, and to provide more control over
  the generation of object names, and to directly support Ruby on Rails.
  Deontic constraints are still handled as Alethic.
  </p>

  <h4>The Constellation API</h4>

  <p>
  The Constellation API (in Ruby) supports the generated Ruby code, by
  allowing any fact population to be asserted into a constellation for
  a given vocabulary. The generated Ruby module for a vocabulary can be
  told which object types are tables in the SQL, and can infer all the
  column names and object mappings from that.
  </p>
  
  <p> Processing of the retract operation (which removes facts from a
  constellation) does not yet propagate retraction through mandatory roles.
  There is not yet a validate operation to verify that all verifible
  constraints are met.  Where a constellation is known to be
  incomplete, that's not yet able to be recorded (this will be used
  in determining which constraints can be checked)
  There is not yet any support within the API for database persistence
  (creating a constellation from query results, and creating, deleting or
  updating database rows by saving a constellation).
  </p>

  <h4>The ORM2 Metamodel</h4>

  <p>
  The ORM2 Metamodel is generated to Ruby from CQL or ORM2 to support
  the creation and manipulation of any semantic model. Some changes are
  upcoming to support synonyms, including allowing a vocabulary to
  provide a translation of an existing vocabulary, such as a Dutch or
  Japanese version of an English language model.
  </p>

  <!--p>
  ActiveFacts can currently read models from NORMA, which are in elementary
  form, and it can reverse engineer the schemas of existing databases in SQL
  Server, DB2, Oracle, and open-source databases not yet tested including
  MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc.  Reverse-engineered models are still in composite
  form - the mapping to elementary form is incomplete.  Reverse engineering
  does not yet analyse actual data.
  </p-->

  <!--p>
  ActiveFacts has no database adapter infrastructure yet. The
  previously-available reverse engineering tools used used the
  infrastructure of ActiveRecord with DRYSql and Composite Primary Keys, but
  future versions will probably just use the ActiveRecord adapters directly.
  </p-->

  <!--p>
  APRIMO allows the definition of vocabulary aspects as well as the addition
  of entity and value objects and the fact types that link them.  Subtyping,
  data types and units, and complex constraints are still to be implemented.
  </p-->

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