Part 25 EXPRESS to UML mapping ballot response review

[David Price]

Hello All,

The ballot comments on Part 25 have finally been reviewed and addressed
(see one exception noted below). A ZIP of the HTML pages and of the
ballot response documents are available at
http://home.freeuk.com/david.m.price/p25_wg11n204.zip and
http://home.freeuk.com/david.m.price/p25_ballot_response_2003_02_24.zip
respectively. They'll be added to the SC4 site ASAP but I wanted to let
people see what has been done. There are things of note are:

1 - The only significant technical change at the moment is that
SCHEMA(s) now map to UML Package(s) within a UML Model. This change was
made after a more thorough review of the UML 1.4 text. See the slides in
the ballot comment ZIP file.

2 - One issue is still marked as Open. The US proposed a "lean" mapping
be added to map the structure of EXPRESS attributes and aggregations
into UML rather than trying to map the semantics of what EXPRESS means
into UML semantics. Nothing has been done on that issue as it seems to
require discussion. I believe this "lean" mapping technically violates
UML 1.4. However, many UML tools would happily accept the resulting XMI
file as they are not strict in their interpretation of UML.

3 - Clause 5 has been significantly reworked to make it cleaner so it
needs review.

4 - The intent of Part 25 is the use of UML as an implementation, not
data modeling, language. Data modeling language issues will be addressed
as part of "EXPRESS/UML harmonization" effort, not in Part 25. With
respect to EXPRESS/UML harmonization, the following announcement of an
important milestone at the March OMG meeting appeared recently:

"The UML 2.0 vote is here! You'll want to attend the Orlando Technical
meeting, where the Analysis and Design (AD) Platform Task Force (PTF)
will vote to recommend adoption of all four parts of the new standard:
language infrastructure and superstructure, Object Constraint Language,
and diagram interchange specification.".

I will not be in San Diego so any discussion with me will have to happen
via email. 

Cheers,
David

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