Abstract
The development of the entity-relationship (ER) model is one of the cornerstones for conceptual modeling of information systems. The Unified Modeling Language (UML) and the Object Constraint Language (OCL) take up central ideas from the ER model and put them into a broad software development context by proposing various graphical sublanguages and diagrams for specialized software development tasks and by adding more precision through textual constraints. The first section of this contribution will introduce the correspondence between basic ER modeling concepts and their UML counterparts. The next part will explain how more advanced conceptual modeling concepts can be formulated in UML. In the following section we will use OCL for features not expressible in diagrammatic form. Then we turn to the description of relational databases with UML. Before we conclude, we will show how to metamodel conceptual modeling features with UML itself and discuss further relevant work from the literature.
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Gogolla, M. (2011). UML and OCL in Conceptual Modeling. In: Embley, D., Thalheim, B. (eds) Handbook of Conceptual Modeling. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-15865-0_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-15865-0_4
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