| Title: |
Creating a UML Profile from the CBDI SAE Meta Model |
| Author: |
John Butler |
| Publication Date: |
30 January 2008 |
| Report Type: |
Journal |
| Report Class: |
Best Practice |
| Abstract: |
CBDI, with assistance from our members, has put a tremendous amount of effort into the creation of a meta model for SOA and has received very positive feedback. We are frequently asked how to actually use it in the course of day to day service planning and provisioning. This article lays out a UML profile that maps the SAE Meta Model to UML and may be used as the basis for capturing a complete set of SAE models in a standard UML tool |
| Backgrounder: |
The CBDI SAE Meta Model is now in its second revision and this is the third article discussing the contents thereof. The first article focused on describing the concepts of the various views of the CBDI Service Architecture and Engineering (SAETM) methodology. The second article focused on providing a populated example of the metamodel by showing instances of the concepts with actual values for the attributes. If the Meta Model represents a logical design for a repository that stores SOA project information, then the second article represented a rudimentary example of how the repository might be populated.
UML Profile for the CBDI SAE Meta Model
The SAE Meta Model provides a formal model of service in terms of its concepts, properties and the relationships between the concepts. It spans the landscape from a notional incarnation of services to those deployed on a technology platform as well as describing the business aspects that provide the driving motivation for their creation. It does not, however, provide a graphical notation that would enable pictorial representations thereof. Even if CBDI had gone that route, there would be the small matter of documenting and implementing the language and then educating potential users on the semantics of the notation. Those who experienced the notation wars of the 1980’s and 1990’s have no desire to relive the experience. Luckily, the industry has gotten beyond the religious wars and standardized on the Unified Modeling Language (UML) for system development. UML is a rich language that comprises both the abstract concepts and their interrelationships and a graphical notation thereof.
So the question now is how to use UML to draw diagrams that represent the concepts included in the CBDI SAE Meta Model. Fortunately, UML includes a mechanism to allow extension of the language to provide new concepts, relationships, properties and constraints on how elements are used – it’s called a Profile. A UML Profile is a coherent set of these extensions packaged together for a particular purpose.
Despite the detail provided in these two earlier articles, many still ask how they might use the Meta Model in their day-to-day work. The purpose of this article is to show how a UML profile can be created based on the SAE Meta Model, incorporated into a UML tool, and then used during the modeling process to capture the SAE metadata.
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| Report Size: |
21 pages |
| Report Access Type: |
 | Silver/Gold (Premium) |
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| Available for separate purchase |
Single copies of recent CBDI Journals may be purchased |
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