UMLSlicer: A tool for modularizing the UML metamodel using slicing

The UML metamodel defines model elements and their relationships for UML diagrams. The large size of the metammodel can prevent tool developers from understanding the UML metamodel and thus from developing UML-based tools. In this paper, we propose an approach to managing the complexity of the UML metamodel by modularizing the metamodel into a set of small metamodels for each UML diagram type. To that goal, we propose a slicing algorithm for extracting diagram-specific metamodels from the UML metamodel and implement UML metamodel slicing tool, UMLSlicer. For seven UML diagrams, we have constructed separate metamodels of a considerably reduced size. To validate our approach, we also have successfully implemented a modeling tool by using the sliced metamodel and investigated its interoperability with other UML modeling tool.