The Impact of UML Class Diagrams on Knowledge Modeling, Discovery and Presentations

Typically, the Unified Modeling Language (UML) is used for visualizing, specifying, constructing, and documenting the artifacts of software-intensive systems. However, there have been some projects showing the usefulness of UML modeling of systems in other areas. In this paper we discuss how to model knowledge from an example subject area and how to convert this model into a well-structured UML graph. UML models can be built to gain a deeper understanding of a subject area, to guide knowledge discovery, to prepare better presentations about the subject (including Web presentations), or to support the learning process. We concentrate our discussion on the impact of UML diagrams on improving learning and, specifically, on new generation Computer Assisted Instruction (CAI) tools that are based on UML diagrams.