NEPTUNE - an integrated UML toolset and methodology

UML (Unified Modelling Language) defines a standard notation for object-oriented systems. It is now the de-facto standard graphical language for specifying, constructing, visualising and documenting software-intensive systems. Some extensions to the original standard have also been proposed and implemented for business modelling. NEPTUNE (Nice Environment with a Process and Tools Using Norms and Examples) is a European Commission-funded project under the IST (Information Society Technologies) programme. A significant innovation in this project is the incorporation of the use of UML in contexts other than software engineering (viz. in business process modelling and knowledge engineering). Additionally, the validation tools that we are developing check for coherency between UML diagrams (for each working context) - something that is not available in other tools. Customised document generation is another powerful functionality.