The Unified Modeling Language for Interactive Applications

The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a standardised notation for creating software application designs in a object-oriented manner. Developers should be able to model complete applications using UML. However, application models in UML  describe few aspects of application user interfaces (UIs). Model-based user interface development environments (MB-UIDEs) are a state-of-the-art approach to user interface development, which provide the capability to design and implement user interfaces in a declarative and systematic way. However, current MB-UIDE technology can only be used to design user interfaces and not applications. Therefore, there is a clear dichotomy between the state-of-the-art approaches to designing and implementing user
interfaces and their underlying applications. 

A MB-UIDE that supports declarative user interface models designed with UML will provide the necessary integration between user interfaces and underlying applications. In fact, by having a single modelling notation, common structures and behaviours of user interfaces and their underlying applications can be shared at design time. Furthermore, user interface developers can have the benefits of designing user interfaces in a declarative, systematic, and also standard way. Considering these benefits, this project addresses the problem of designing and implementing user interfaces using a combination of UML and MB-UIDE techniques. 

The on-line tutorial provides some details concerning the UMLi notation. Further details, however, are available in [ProjectDetails] and [Publications].
 
email: paulo@psemantica.com