UML Class Diagram | Working and Advantage | Role and Features

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Before understanding (Unified Modelling Language)UML Class Diagram we must understand Object-Oriented Design and Analysis. Object Orientation mainly deals with the investigation of the real-time entities which are objects and their relationships. Efficient analysis of the objects starts with identification, followed by functionalities, followed by relationships, and finally, the design is produced.

The above process of Object-Oriented analysis can be described in detail as follows –

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A picture is worth a thousand words and a UML (Unified Modelling Language) reflects the meaning of the statement at its best by modeling a software system.

UML Class Diagrams or Unified Modelling Language Diagrams are general-purpose modeling language that is used to visualize a system; especially an object-oriented system. It is an industry-wide accepted standard language for visualizing, specifying, documenting, and constructing artifacts of software systems. UML was pioneered by Object Management Group (OMG) and UML’s first version v1.0 specification was released in January 1997.

UMLs are the union of all modeling languages like use case diagrams, class diagrams, object diagrams, sequence diagrams, collaboration diagrams, state-chart diagrams, activity diagrams, component diagrams, deployment diagrams, and the list goes on. It is the really very big & nice standard that the industry has adopted and embraced.

Object-Oriented Design came into the picture in order to build software products to deal with real-time objects and in order to have a nice overview about this OOP design, in order to have a better logical view of the same, we transform the OOP design into Unified Modelling Languages which are diagrams that represent the whole software system. This is why it is very important to learn OOP concepts before dealing with the UMLs.

As we know that UML models real-time systems, it is important to make a conceptual model using building blocks of UML which are –

Things are the atomic units of Unified Modelling Language (UML) and they can be sub-divided as –

Relationships in Unified Modelling Language represent the dependency or the functionality or the association between two UML things. There are four kinds of relationships in UML, as follows –

This is a correlation between two UML things where if one changes then the other changes.

Combining all the above components to give a meaningful, logical view of the whole software system is what we call as Diagrams. These diagrams will have different shapes for which we can define our own meanings. For example, we can define a square to represent static data and a parallelogram to define a loop.

The main components of the UML Class diagrams. Class diagrams can be used to represent relationships, classes, interfaces, inheritance, collaboration, and association. Briefly, a class diagram describes different types of objects and static relationships among them.

Let’s try to draw a class diagram of a Student and see how it goes.

From the above diagrams, you can see that there is a class called Student with different attributes like first name, last name, home address, school address, and for the address which is of same generic structure, it inherits from another class called Address which defines the data structure for address. So, one can understand the relationship (a dependency) between the two. If there were any methods in the class to implement any functionality then they also would be included in the same class diagram rectangles with details about the parameters and return values.

How do we design classes?

Problems in the domain of artificial intelligence are usually complex. One needs a large amount of knowledge and techniques to manipulate that knowledge to create solutions to problems. Though there are a variety of new ways of representing knowledge (facts) exist, Unified Modelling Language remains a good standard again.

In AI terms, there are two types of UML entities.

One way of structuring these entities is at the knowledge level, at which facts are described as informal, colloquial language. Ex-Tiger is the name of a dog. Another way is at the symbol level, at which representations of facts at the knowledge level are defined in terms of symbols that can be transformed, processed, or manipulated by programs.

A question arises, is UML which is significantly old still relevant for us from the career point of view. The answer is ‘yes’. UML is very useful in any kind of project and especially big projects. Sequence diagrams help two modules understand their flow, use case diagrams help to show the usefulness and functionality of the product, a component diagram shows the product architecture. Basically, UML shows us the big picture of the software system that is being built.

In a sense, UMLs are greatly used by high-level software architects and lead engineers to brief the developers about what needs to be developed. And a section in this article also described its use in the field of Artificial Intelligence. So, yes, having knowledge about UML is of great use in your career.

Well, follow the below steps –

There are a lot of tools available to draw a Unified Modelling Language. A few are as follows –

In conclusion, one can say that UML (Unified Modelling Language) can be defined as a modeling language to model all possible complex software systems and complex practical systems.

This has been a guide to the UML Class Diagram. Here we discussed the advantage and disadvantages, the working type of class diagram, role, and features of the UML Class Diagram. You can also go through our other suggested articles to learn more –

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