Determine which diagraming tool is recommended

[jamsden]

No description provided.

[jamsden]

All figures in the specifications are HTML images. So any tool that can save an image in a reasonable format would be useful. However, we also need to be able to store the sources of these images in the SVN repository, and they need to be available for editing by any document editor. This implies some kind of common tool that can easily work with source files would also be useful. Finally, using standard notations like UML is also useful and works very effectively with RDF. For example, RDF/OWL classes can be displayed as UML classes with assertions whose objects are primitive types displayed as attributes of the class, and assertions whose objects are other objects displayed as associations. This produces diagrams that are RDF friendly while still being familiar to people more use to object-oriented, ERA and other closed-world, structure-based schema notations.

TopBraid Composer would be a good choice because of its support for RDF. However, the free version does not provide the diagrams, and since its an eclipse based tool, the startup overhead is high for people not familiar with eclipse.

Protege would be another option, but I couldn‘t quickly find a UML visualization plugin for Protege. Most people have PowerPoint (or other compatible presentation tools like Pages or OpenOffice). That may be sufficient for the figures we need to develop in the OSLC Core specifications. Domain specifications may have greater needs for UML-like diagrams.

[jamsden]

I used UMLet to create the new figure in the overview document. There‘s a free version that‘s not that great. The Web version is better but requires a subscription.