UML14 — UML super/Section 2/Compliance points

The actual compliance levels as given on p. 1 ("no", "partial", "compliant", "interchange") are inadequate.

For example, it is unclear what it means to "comply to the semantics", since semantics is generally stated in the proposal in terms of the system being modeled. Does a tool that simply provides a way to draw syntactically well-defined UML diagrams "comply to the semantics"?

Furthermore, it is also unclear what it means to "comply to abstract syntax". What about a tool that presents the notation, but does not use the abstract syntax as its internal representation? Would such a tool only be able to claim "partial compliance", even if it provides 100% of the UML notation? If not, what is the criteria for compliance with abstract syntax?

Even more problematic, XMI compliance is only required at the "interchange" level, which also requires compliance to abstract syntax, notation and semantics. This would seem to exclude any tool that processes XMI, but does not use the notation-for example, an execution engine that runs off XMI input or a tool that configures itself using an XMI-formatted UML model. There should be a way to claim XMI compliance without being a full modeling tool.

In general, the compliance levels do not seem to be defined in a way that will be useful for the range of tools that may want to usefully claim UML compliance.

Recommendation:

The 2U proposal (ad/2003-01-08) contained a particularly good discussion of compliance in Section 0.8, separately addressing XMI, syntax and semantics compliance. The UML 2.0 specification as adopted should compliance discussion based on the 2U approach.

see above