What's new! (December 28, 2014)

Ontological techniques use commonly understood notions of categories and conditions of membership to increase formality while preserving accessibility. They focus attention on the potential members of categories, facilitating communication based on concrete examples, and supporting more complex membership conditions as necessary. These techniques enable languages to be built up from smaller, simply defined elements to larger ones, by creating new categories with membership conditions based on existing simpler categories, in thin enough layers that languages are more easily understood in a uniform way.

• Logical Modeling for Engineering (see links to slides and video)
Introduces basic concepts of categorization in the context of engineering models. Sometimes called ontology, categorization is present in widely-used modeling languages such as SysML/UML. It can be used to capture relationships between categories and the things falling into them, including categories of modeling languages elements necessary to define engineering-friendly languages. The presentation introduces basic SysML/UML notation supporting categorization.
• Ontological Product Modeling For Collaborative Design   (Slides)
Shows how to combine ontological and model-based techniques in languages that facilitate collaborative product design exploration. Uses ontology to capture alternative designs and incremental refinements that meet requirements and earlier design commitments, and open world semantics to support design collaboration with flexible and accurate design combination, refinement, and consistency checking. Model-b.ased techniques are applied to develop more powerful, engineering-friendly languages for using ontology.

• Ontological Behavior Modeling  (Slides)
Applies ontological techniques to behaviors in UML, using the logical meanings for classification introduced in UML 2. The article suggests unifying UML's three kinds of behavior languages around the abstract syntax and semantics of composite structure, UML's model for capturing interconnection of parts of classes. This significantly simplifies the UML metamodel, provides a formal semantics to clarify ambiguities in the current informal semantics, and increases the expressiveness of UML behaviors.


Presentations of earlier, UML-independent versions:

• Business Semantics for Business Processes
  
• Execution Interoperability
  
• BPDM Tutorial, Part I
  
• BPDM Tutorial, Part II
  
• Rule-enabled Process Modeling
  
• Orchestration and Choreography for Business Change
  

A compact and computationally complete subset of UML 2 with a full specification of its semantics defined operationally and declaratively. The operational semantics is executable model with methods written in Java, with a mapping to UML Activity Diagrams. The declarative semantics is specified in first order logic and based on PSL, see Clause 10.

• Specification

• UML without Pictures
By Conrad Bock
Reviews the primary concepts of repository-centered development with the UML, explaining the relation between notation, semantics, and model compilation.
• Eclipse repository
Open source implementation of the complete UML 2 metamodel.

• UML 2 Activity Modeling for Domain Experts (UML as a Knowledge Language)
Presentation reviewing UML from domain experts' viewpoint, and activity modeling in particular.
• UML 2 Composition Model
Describes a major upgrade to the UML composition model, which supports connections between parts at the same level of decomposition, which increases independence of reused applications and provides better plug-compatibility for components. Based partly on earlier work on composition. Also see formalization of part-part connections in OWL 2.
• UML 2.0 Activities and Actions
By Conrad Bock
A series of articles covering the standard models, their semantics, with examples and repository models (also see introductory presentation).

• Overview
• Actions
• Control Nodes
• Object Nodes
• Partitions
• Structured Activities
• Specification
  UML 2 includes:
  
  • A major revision of UML activity modeling that gives it a flow modeling semantics, and integrates activity and action modeling, see chapters 12 and 11 in UML 2.4.1 and Clauses 15 and 16 in UML 2.5
  • Interchange of diagrammatic layout and routing (applying Diagram Interchange), see Annex B in UML 2.5

• Martin Fowler's UML Bliki

• Model Interchange Work Group   (Wiki)
Test cases for UML/SysML vendors to ensure tool interoperability.
• UML 2.0 Response to Request for Information
by Conrad Bock
Requested Enhancements to UML structural and behavioral modeling for UML 2.

• Goal-driven Modeling, Part II
by Conrad Bock
Elaborates on goal-driven modeling with extensions to object-oriented languages that directly support goal-driven modeling.
• Goal-driven Modeling
by Conrad Bock
The parts of a behavior interface are reviewed, and a goal-based technique for defining them is presented. Focusing on goals coordinates the choices involved in designing behavior interfaces, links them more closely to the object model, and places object-orientation within a spectrum of modeling styles that includes event-driven and rule-based approaches.
• A More Object-oriented State Machine
by Conrad Bock
Identifies two common approaches to state modeling and explains why they provide more powerful analysis when combined under an object-oriented framework. The technique, an elaboration of Gamma's State Pattern, is proposed as an extension to UML.
• Unified Behavior Models
by Conrad Bock
Examines language unification in general and of the three models above in particular, taking Unified Modeling Language (UML) as a case study.
• Three Kinds of Behavior Model
by Conrad Bock
Reviews three conventional forms of behavior model and how they can be used in an object-oriented way.

• Part IV: Aggregation
by Conrad Bock and James Odell
Proposes a model of aggregation that supports relations as parts and relations as aggregates.
• Part III: Roles
by Conrad Bock and James Odell
Formalizes the notion of role by extending standard object-oriented concepts.
• Part II: Mappings
by Conrad Bock and James Odell
Shows how standard design of relations is incomplete, and gives a better model.
• Part I: Relations as Object Types
by Conrad Bock and James Odell
Shows how standard analysis of relations is ambiguous when it comes time to implement, and gives a more complete model.

• UML 2 Composition Model

• Interactive Demo of Inheriting Part-Whole Information
Tired of modelling part-whole without any connections between the parts? This demo is still in OOIE notation but applies with UML also.
• A User-Level Model of Composition
by Conrad Bock and James Odell
More about part-whole modelling from the user's perspective.
• A Foundation for Composition
by Conrad Bock and James Odell
Part-whole modelling from a formal viewpoint.
• Six Kinds of Composition
by James Odell
A taxonomy of part-whole modelling based on research in cognitive science.

• James Odell's web site, also covers analysis and design topics.
• UML Extensions for Agents
by James Odell and Conrad Bock