Enforcing ontological rules in conceptual modeling using UML: principles and implementation

Abstract

UML is very popular in software engineering and is used for at least two purposes: OO software design and conceptual modeling. However, UML's origins in software engineering may limit its appropriateness for conceptual modeling. Evermann and Wand (2003, 2002, 2001) point out that conceptual modeling involves representing the real world, and that ontology is the branch of philosophy dealing with that. They developed a set of ontological rules placing constraints on the construction of UML diagrams, to ensure that they properly represent underlying ontological assumptions. However, no existing UML-based CASE tools enforce such rules. The purpose of this research is to implement such functionality in an UML-based CASE tool to guide the modeling process. Also, this research develops better understandings of the rules by considering how they can be implemented. Our implementation has built-in 'intelligence' to detect and explain the nature of violations.