Working with Projects and Schemas

An ICOM project consists in a set of possibly related EER schemas. Schemas are composed by a set of items like classes and relations, and also non-standard EER constructs such as axioms. In order to start working with ICOM you have to create a project, or load an existing one. The File menu and its submenus (see figure 2) provide a number of items relating to the creation, loading, opening, saving and closing of projects and schemas. They can be saved and read as text files using an internal XML format, or using the DIG protocol syntax. It is also possible to import class diagrams in the UML XMI format.

Figure 2: ICOM File menu.
Image FileMenu

As soon as a project is created or loaded, ICOM enters in the project editing mode, and a set of panels appear:

In figure 3 you can see these three panels describing an empty project, at the moment when the project contextual menu is activated.
Figure 3: ICOM project panels and contextual menu.
Image ProjectArea

Multiple projects can be opened at the same time, but objects cannot be moved between them - only one project is visible at a time and editing of each project is independent. You can switch between different projects using the tabs at the bottom of the editing panel.

Pablo Fillottrani 2010-08-17