Unified Modeling Language

The unified modeling language (UML) is a general-purpose visual modeling language that is intended to provide a standard way to visualize the design of a system.^[1]

UML provides a standard notation for many types of diagrams which can be roughly divided into three main groups: behavior diagrams, interaction diagrams, and structure diagrams.

The creation of UML was originally motivated by the desire to standardize the disparate notational systems and approaches to software design. It was developed at Rational Software in 1994–1995, with further development led by them through 1996.^[2]

In 1997, UML was adopted as a standard by the Object Management Group (OMG) and has been managed by this organization ever since. In 2005, UML was also published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) as the ISO/IEC 19501 standard.^[3] Since then the standard has been periodically revised to cover the latest revision of UML.^[4]

In software engineering, most practitioners do not use UML, but instead produce informal hand drawn diagrams; these diagrams, however, often include elements from UML.^[5]^: 536

^ Unified Modeling Language 2.5.1. OMG Document Number formal/2017-12-05. Object Management Group Standards Development Organization (OMG SDO). December 2017.
^ Cite error: The named reference :1 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
^ "ISO/IEC 19501:2005 - Information technology - Open Distributed Processing - Unified Modeling Language (UML) Version 1.4.3". Iso.org. 1 April 2005. Retrieved 7 May 2015.
^ "ISO/IEC 19505-1:2012 - Information technology - Object Management Group Unified Modeling Language (OMG UML) - Part 1: Infrastructure". Iso.org. 20 April 2012. Retrieved 10 April 2014.
^ Sebastian Baltes; Stephan Diehl (11 November 2014). "Sketches and diagrams in practice". Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering. FSE 2014. Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 530–541. arXiv:1706.09172. doi:10.1145/2635868.2635891. ISBN 978-1-4503-3056-5. S2CID 2436333.

[OMG-1] Unified Modeling Language 2.5.1. OMG Document Number formal/2017-12-05. Object Management Group Standards Development Organization (OMG SDO). December 2017.

[:1-2] Cite error: The named reference :1 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).

[3] "ISO/IEC 19501:2005 - Information technology - Open Distributed Processing - Unified Modeling Language (UML) Version 1.4.3". Iso.org. 1 April 2005. Retrieved 7 May 2015.

[4] "ISO/IEC 19505-1:2012 - Information technology - Object Management Group Unified Modeling Language (OMG UML) - Part 1: Infrastructure". Iso.org. 20 April 2012. Retrieved 10 April 2014.

[5] Sebastian Baltes; Stephan Diehl (11 November 2014). "Sketches and diagrams in practice". Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering. FSE 2014. Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 530–541. arXiv:1706.09172. doi:10.1145/2635868.2635891. ISBN 978-1-4503-3056-5. S2CID 2436333.

[1]

[2]

[3]

[4]

[5]