What is UML?
Filed under EA FAQs
The official OMG specifiation says:
“The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a graphical language for visualizing, specifying, constructing, and documenting the artifacts of a software-intensive system.
The UML offers a standard way to write a system’s blueprints, including conceptual things such as business processes and system functions as well as concrete things such as programming language statements, database schemas, and reusable software components.”
The most important thing to understand is, that UML is a language for specifying! It is not a method or procedure. With UML you define a software system - UML is the language who writes the blueprint and does not specify itself in that methodology or process.
Following domains can be defined with notation and semantics:
- Use case model
- Communication model
- State or dynamic model
- Logical or class model
- Physical component model
- Physical deployment model
UML also offers the possibility for extending the UML for your specialized needs (for example Business Process Modeling extensions). For further information on Business Process Modeling take a look at the whitepapers BPM.
