The application of UML and an open distributed process framework to information system design

The development of information systems to support design and manufacturing activities should follow a reference model in order to be compatible with major systems architectures. In contrast, computational methodologies and notations provide ways to design and build information systems but usually do not take reference models into consideration. This paper discusses how reference models and computational methodologies/notation can be used in harmony, and demonstrates this through an example of an information system design where Unified Modelling Language (UML) diagrams are applied to represent the Reference Model of Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP) viewpoints. A selected set of UML diagrams has been applied in the Enterprise, Information and Computational RM-ODP viewpoint. The inherent object-oriented properties of the reported research further enable and facilitate the migration of essential elements from one RM-ODP viewpoint to another via the use of UML notation. This approach provides an important contribution by harmonising a range of views of an information system. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.