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United We Model: Unified Modeling Language (UML)

on 24 March 2020

As this is my first blog entry written since borders have closed and many regions have gone into lockdown due to COVID-19 (Coronavirus), I wish to acknowledge the situation, send my best wishes to all and especially those directly impacted by it, and recognize continuing a series on graphics for financial professionals may seem callous when non-essential businesses may even be ordered closed in your region, as they are in mine.

When the United Nations wishes to facilitate trade through the establishment of standards, the use of a family of graphical standards is paramount to collecting and communicating the reason for, uses of and expression of those standards. The family for these standards is known as UML, the Unified Modeling Language. The “U” is a recognition that there used to be many divergent ways of illustrating models of processes and data and activities, and that a group got together in the mid-90s to standardize the many proprietary notation systems. The Object Management Group (OMG) has managed UML since 1997 (so it was well on the table as OMG and XBRL were helping usher the Interoperability Pledge I have previously mentioned), and UML is an ISO standard (ISO/IEC 19501:2005, reviewed and reconfirmed in 2019).

The “M” is about the needs of representing conceptual things like business processes, system functions, database elements and other important development needs not dependent on programming languages, information syntaxes or other system dependent requirements.

In the space I have for this blog entry, I would not be able to do justice to UML, so I will refer to one of the documents we use within the United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT) – the Business Requirements Specification (BRS) for the Journal Book Daybook (1). You will find a number of graphics, but I will refer to a few in particular. They are representative of the two main categories of UML diagrams: Structural Diagrams and Behavioral Diagrams.

Page 17 shows a Use Case Diagram, one of the behavioral UML tpes, with a graphic overview of the actors involved in a system, the functions those actors needs, and how those functions interact.

Page 22 has a Class Diagram, probably the main building block of these works and of any object-oriented solution, in this case identifying data groupings and interrelationships

The importance of UML is laid out in UN/CEFACT’s Modelling Methodology (UMM)(2). And even though CEFACT is heavily invested in Extensible Markup Language (XML), UML is the standard for which a standardized procedure is used to create the XML Schemas, using CEFACT’S XML Naming and Design Rules (3).

As financial professionals work with modelers and developers in creating, customizing or extending the systems in use, UML may be an important tool for shared understanding and agreement.

(1) https://www.unece.org/fileadmin/DAM/cefact/brs/BRS_JournalBook-DayBook.PDF

(2) https://www.unece.org/fileadmin/DAM/cefact/umm/UMM_Foundation_Module.pdf

(3) https://www.unece.org/fileadmin/DAM/cefact/xml/XML-Naming-And-Design-Rules-V2_1.pdf

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