OCL-Lite: A Decidable (Yet Expressive) Fragment of OCL

Anna Queralt, Alessandro Artale, Diego Calvanese, and Ernest Teniente

Proc. of the 25th Int. Workshop on Description Logics (DL 2012). Volume 846 of CEUR Workshop Proceedings, https://ceur-ws.org/. 2012.

The UML has become a de facto standard in conceptual modeling. Class diagrams in UML allow one to model the data in the domain of interest by specifying a set of graphical constraints. However, in most cases one needs to provide the class diagram with additional semantics to completely specify the domain, and this is where OCL comes into play. While reasoning over class diagrams is decidable and has been investigated intensively, it is well known that checking the correctness of OCL constraints is undecidable. Thus, we introduce OCL-Lite, a fragment of the full OCL language and prove that reasoning over UML class diagrams with OCL-Lite constraints is in ExpTime by an encoding in the description logic ALCI . As a side result, DL techniques and tools can be used to reason on UML class diagrams annotated with arbitrary OCL-Lite constraints.


@inproceedings{DL-2012-ocl,
   title = "OCL-Lite:  A Decidable (Yet Expressive) Fragment of OCL",
   year = "2012",
   author = "Anna Queralt and Alessandro Artale and Diego Calvanese and
Ernest Teniente",
   booktitle = "Proc. of the 25th Int. Workshop on Description Logics
(DL 2012)",
   pages = "312--322",
   volume = "846",
   publisher = "CEUR-WS.org",
   series = "CEUR Workshop Proceedings, https://ceur-ws.org/",
}
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