A Systematic Approach to Domain-Specific Language Design Using UML

Abstract

UML includes special extensibility mechanisms, which are used to define domain-specific modeling languages that are based on UML. These mechanisms have been significantly improved in the latest versions of UML. Unfortunately, there is currently a dearth of published material on how to best exploit these capabilities and, consequently, many UML profiles are either invalid or of poor quality. In this paper, we first provide an overview of the new extensibility mechanisms of UML 2.1 and then describe a method for defining profiles that greatly increases the likelihood of producing technically correct quality UML profiles