xUMLi: Towards a Tool-independent UML Processing Platform

Being a modeling language rather than a method, UML does not inherently define a design process. Consequently there is no common basis for building design process support for UML tools. They often offer extension interfaces, which allow external applications to access and handle the UML models constructed using that particular tool. Although they support extensibility and customizability, such tool-dependent solutions are typically suitable only for performing single operations or tasks. In this paper, we propose a tool-independent software platform, which allows the user to build and combine various kinds of UML processing facilities and use them from integrated CASE-tools. The proposed solution conforms to the UML standard metamodel and hides the individual conventions and complexities of the CASE-tool APIs. We discuss our solution, its architecture and API, and also illustrate their usage by giving an example.