A Novel Approach for Automatic Generation of UML Class Diagrams from XMI

Abstract

XMI (XML Metadata Interchange) is used to exchange metadata information of UML (Unified Modeling Language) models using XML (Extensible Markup Language) representation. All major CASE tools e.g. ArgoUML, Rational Rose, Enterprise Architect, MS Visio, Altova, Smart Draw, etc can export and import XMI. However, current implementation of XMI in all CASE tools does not fulfill the goal of a model interchange as the CASE tools can just import XMI and extract metadata information but cannot generate UML models such as UML class diagrams. A primary reason of this inability is that XMI only provides the information about what elements are in a UML class model but not the information about how these elements (such as classes, associations, etc) are represented and laid out in diagrams. Without this facility, the real power of XMI is still un-explored. In this paper, we present a Binary Space Portioning (BSP) Tree data structure based novel approach to re-generate UML diagrams from XMI. A VB.NET implementation is also presented as a proof of concept.