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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 2863))

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Abstract

A software design is often modelled as a collection of UML diagrams. There is an inherent need to preserve consistency between these diagrams. Moreover, through evolution those diagrams get modified leading to possible inconsistency between different versions of the diagrams. State-of-the-art UML CASE tools provide poor support for consistency maintenance. To solve this problem, an extension of the UML metamodel enabling support for consistency maintenance and a classification of inconsistency problems is proposed. To achieve the detection and resolution of consistency conflicts, the use of description logic (DL) is presented. DL has the important property of being a decidable fragment of first-order predicate logic. By means of a number of concrete experiments in Loom, we show the feasibility of using this formalism for the purpose of maintaining consistency between (evolving) UML models.

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© 2003 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Van Der Straeten, R., Mens, T., Simmonds, J., Jonckers, V. (2003). Using Description Logic to Maintain Consistency between UML Models. In: Stevens, P., Whittle, J., Booch, G. (eds) «UML» 2003 - The Unified Modeling Language. Modeling Languages and Applications. UML 2003. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2863. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-45221-8_28

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-45221-8_28

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-20243-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-45221-8

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