Ed Seidewitz, THE driving force behind the new Executable UML standards (see also our Executable UML page for general information and resources on Executable UML) has recently uploaded a presentation on slideshare where he reviews the latest modifications on these standards and their implications.

You can find the summary and slides of his presentation below:


The Unified Modeling Language (UML) has arguably succeeded in becoming the most commonly used modeling notation for software development. But “modeling” in the software community seems largely to mean simply drawing pictures, either to represent the problem domain or to blueprint a solution, without a precise enough meaning to fully specify the functionality of the system being developed. As a result, the UML standard,S up to and including UML 2.4.1, do not define the semantics of UML models at all precisely.

Nevertheless, there has also long been an interest in models that are more precise, even to the extent that they may be executed in their own right. It has taken a while for this viewpoint to penetrate into the mainstream of UML usage. But there has been in a great deal of work in recent years toward the standardization of the formal semantics of UML models – the “meaning” behind the pictures: the Foundational UML (fUML) specification adopted in 2008; the Action Language for fUML (Alf), adopted in 2010; the UML 2.5 specification (which includes a semantics conformance point for the first time); and the Precise Semantics of UML Composite Structures.

This presentation reviews the state of this work and the implications in practice of bringing real meaning to UML.

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