A New Method to Interrogate and Check UML Class Diagrams

Abstract

We present a new method for graphically interrogating and checking UML class diagrams. We employ the model of conceptual graphs (CGs) as representation, calculation and visualisation model. The key idea of our work is to translate UML class diagrams into the formalism of CGs. First, UML notations are encoded into UML Ontology that is a support of CG. Second, using the UML Ontology, a UML class diagram can be translated into a CG, called CG class diagram. Third, CG class diagrams can be interrogated via the elementary operation of CG, named projection. Fourth, constraints and rules provides a way to model specifications for checking CG class diagrams. We use two approaches to check a class diagram: object-oriented specifications and field specifications.