Extending profiles with stereotypes for composite concepts1

This paper proposes an extension of the UML 2.0 profiling mechanism. This extension facilitates a language designer to introduce composite concepts as separate conceptual and notational elements in a modelling language. Composite concepts are compositions of existing concepts. To facilitate the introduction of composite concepts, the notion of stereotype is extended. This extension defines how a composite concept can be specified and added to a language’s metamodel, without modifying the existing metamodel. From the definition of the stereotype, rules can be derived for transforming a language element that represents a composite concept into a composition of language elements that represent the concepts that constitute the composite. Such a transformation facilitates tool developers to introduce tool support for composite concepts, e.g., by re-using existing tools that support the constituent concepts. To illustrate our ideas, example definitions of stereotypes and transformations for composite concepts are presented.