Assignment 3

Post your questions to the Piazza forum, read replies, and collaborate on the forum with your colleagues. Additional constraints will be revealed in discussions. You are required to accommodate those constraints in your model. This is similar to uncovering additional information by consulting subject matter experts as you realize that there is missing, incomplete, or contradictory information given.

Question 1 (10 Points)

Information Scientists and Business Analysts often use tools for much of the work they do. Often, they need to first find or select a tool. Do some research on tools that allow you to create UML Class Diagrams. One example is ArgoUML. Find three tools and write a short description/review of each listing the tool's name, whether it's free or whether a free version is available, company URL, and how well it supports UML Class Diagrams (based on what you can gather from the website; you do not have to install each tool.) One tool must be a diagramming tool, one must be a modeling tool, and the other can be either. Do not include LucidChart in your list of tools.

Question 2 (30 Points)

Build an ontology for tracking products used in an organizations using the use cases below. Start by defining the domain boundaries for the list of competency questions (use cases) below - that means that you only consider the classes that you need to support the use cases rather than all of the classes that you might think of for project management. Visualize the ontology as a UML Class Diagram using one of the tools identified above (and not LucidChart). The result of the effort should be a single UML Class Diagram that contains the necessary classes to support the use cases below and the requisite relationships (association, aggregation, generalization/inheritance) with multiplicities where known. In addition, the diagram should reflect the additional constraints revealed in discussions on the forum.

Note that a UML Class Diagram only contains "generic"/"abstract" concepts rather than concrete instances/examples. For example, your class diagram is going to contain a "Product" class to describe a generic, abstract product instead of Atlassian Jira used by the software development team. UML does have an object diagram that would allow you to visualize concrete instances but you would need multiple object diagrams to show all of the scenarios. In practice, you use object diagrams to provide example for people who may not understand abstract class diagrams.

Competency Question ("Use Cases")

As the CFO, I want to know all of the products that are currently used by various teams or units at the organization.
As a CFO, I want to know the products that are are in use by consulting teams doing projects for clients.
As a project manager, I want to know all the products that are used by my team.
As a procurement specialist, I want to know the cost of each product, the vendor, the version, and the length and cost of the support contract.
As a CFO, I want to know the total as well as annual cost of all support contracts.

Question 3 (60 Points)

Create an XML file that implements the ontology from above in XML with an appropriate DTD. This is a specific set of instances -- you can invent them as you see fit. Be sure to view the XML to ensure it is valid. Define constraints as needed but be sure your UML model from Question 2 reflects them. You may want to use an editor such as Sublime, JEdit, RStudio, or Aptana Studio to help you create the XML. Do some exploring to find a suitable tool.

What to Submit

Submit the reviews of your UML tool reviews, screen shots of your UML Class Diagram represented ontology, and the XML file in a single PDF.
In addition, submit the XML file containing sample instances based directly on the ontology and the DTD defining the XML tag rules.

Scoring

Total Number of Earnable Points: 100
Approximate Time to Complete: 4-6 hours
Due Date: see Calendar or Blackboard