Building a UML Profile for COSA Software Architecture

COSA (component object based software architecture) describes systems as a collection of components that interact with each other using connectors. In COSA, components and connectors have the same level of abstraction and defined explicitly. The definitions of architectural elements as types allow the instantiation of multiple architectures. UML 2.0 provides a set of extension mechanisms for documenting software architecture. In this article, we present a UML profile to express the semantics of the concepts of COSA using the new notations of UML 2.0. This profile improves the portability and the reusability of architectural concepts and reduces the problems of ambiguity