Publication

Abstract : This paper describes a new Document Type Definition (DTD) to represent UML activity diagram in XMI (XML Metadata Interchange) format. DTDs are important as far as automatic code generation is concerned. Our proposed DTD considers the activity diagram as a graph. The elements in the activity diagram are nodes and edges. The old versions (1.x) of the UML DTDs describe the activity diagram as a special type of state machine. The proposed DTD is based on UML 2.0, where the activity diagram semantics is rooted in Petri Nets rather than state machines. The proposed DTD defines the tags for different types (action, decision, initial, final etc.) of nodes in the activity diagram and the attributes required for the edges. Each node and edge in the activity diagram can be mapped to the respective XMI tags using this DTD. This can be done in sequential manner. The paper also describes how this DTD is used in the conversion of activity diagram to XMI format, and an algorithm for the conversion process.