On UML

[frank.mccabe@us.fujitsu.com]

The issue with UML are
1. A somewhat spurious sense of formality. In fact, the semantics of  
even UML 2.0 are less than clear on even the basics such as what does  
inheritance mean?
2. The strong bias towards one relationship: isa, when in reality we  
will need a great many more relationships: describes, has, owns,  
implements, responsible-for, correlates, etc. etc.
3. The strong bias (on the part of certain vendors) to automatically  
generating code from UML, resulting in a tendency to 'go concrete' very  
quickly.

An alternate suggestion: mind maps. A mind map is simply a collection  
of concepts and relationships connecting them. V. simple, and in my  
experience v. flexible. It is also possible to develop rigour by  
mapping into predicate logic.

Frank