UPDM — Swedish Armed Forces General Comments

· UPDM uses extensions of associations to a very large degree, in most cases first showing entities as having named associations to other entities and then defining stereotypes for these associations. It is the view of the author that this should have been dealt with by making use of the association extensions within the meta-model itself rather than having them as separate entities. The latter is the approach adopted by MODAF.
· A set of different entities have been hard-coded into UPDM in the form of classes as well as enumeration entities. This is considered fairly dangerous since this can very well change over time making UPDM difficult to maintain. Its use could also well pose national problems since the values may not be applicable everywhere. MODAF/ NAF have avoided the use of any such entities and left them to be part of the model or referred to as externally defined entities, something that seems to be a better approach.
· It is difficult to understand why the different views should be stereotyped at all. The whole point of a modern architecture framework would seem to be to get away from strict adherence to a set of views. The main utility is the meta-model itself and how different entities tie together. How a user elects to visualise this is much less important. The addition of the Custom view is not felt to adequately deal with this.
· It is noted that as UPDM contains different compliance levels, exchanges between tools operating at different UPDM compliance levels will require recognition of these differences as well as translations if the exchange is to be successful.