THE DRESDEN OCL TOOLKIT AND ITS ROLE IN INFORMATION SYSTEMS DEVELOPMENT

The Object Constraint Language (OCL) is a part of the Unified Modeling Language (UML), the OMG standard in modeling of object-oriented applications. It is a formal language for defining constraints on UML models, especially in class and statechart diagrams. OCL does not require a mathematical background and can be understood by most software developers. The language is very powerful because it can be used together with class and other UML diagrams at different model layers. By the specification of OCL constraints at the metamodel layer, it is for example possible to ensure the consistency of conceptual modeling artifacts. In the practice of database and software engineering, however, OCL is not yet known because most UML tools do not support OCL. Therefore, at the Dresden University of Technology, we developed a toolkit handling OCL constraints. We also gained with our toolkit initial experience in using OCL in real projects. In this paper we outline the structure of the Dresden OCL Toolkit and how to apply it in information systems development.