Authors:
Grzegorz Fałda
1
;
Wiktor Filipowicz
1
;
Piotr Habela
1
;
Krzysztof Stencel
1
;
Kazimierz Subieta
1
and
Krzysztof Kaczmarski
2
Affiliations:
1
Polish-Japanese Institute of Information Technology, Poland
;
2
Warsaw University of Technology, Poland
Keyword(s):
Database, Object-oriented, Query language, Visual, Query by example, Model driven architecture, UML, OCL.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Databases and Datawarehouses
;
Internet Technology
;
Searching and Browsing
;
Usability and Ergonomics
;
User Modeling
;
Web Information Systems and Technologies
;
Web Interfaces and Applications
Abstract:
Precise modelling of behaviour is an area where programming meets modelling, and textual syntax competes with a visual one. By developing a UML based platform-independent framework, we aimed to find a visual syntax aid to make the language more approachable to stakeholders, while taking advantage of existing UML syntax intuitions and offering a truly higher level of abstraction. Our solution consists of seamlessly integrated UML Actions and the Object Constraint Language (OCL) as a database query language, featuring both a textual and a visual syntax. In this paper we describe a declarative, Query by Example (QBE)-based approach to visualizing OCL expressions over a UML object-oriented model instance, to be used inside of textual or visual imperative statements. Such visual OCL expressions can also be used as ad-hoc queries. The paper presents a choice of visual syntax and describes its underlying semantics.