XMI : Exchanging Models and Interchanging Ideas Using UML
As the official OMG specification for exchanging model information between tools and repositories, XMI will have a huge impact on architects and developers. Find out how to use this spec to make your model metadata agnostic and portable for the future.
by Mark Goetsch
August 15, 2005
MI is the standard that everyone has heard about but few are sure what to do with. Beginning with this article, I will demonstrate some interesting value-added ideas on the use of this standard. In future articles I will use XMI to grab information about assets from UML diagrams, put hardware from a database back into a UML diagram, trace from one UML diagram to another, and a few other interesting tricks. But before we get to that, this first article will look at XMI in its raw form, as an XML document, and break down some of the key structural elements.
What is XMI?
XMI stands for XML Metadata Interchange and is the official OMG specification for exchanging model information between modeling tools and repositories. Version 1.0 was anointed in June 2000 and the current version 2.0 was released May 2003. As a standard, XMI is part of OMG's MOF, and is thereby connected to the other MOF-related standards, such as UML and MDA. (Note: the versioning for UML and XMI are independent of one another. The current version of XMI was originally used for UML 1.4.)
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MI is the standard that everyone has heard about but few are sure what to do with. Beginning with this article, I will demonstrate some interesting value-added ideas on the use of this standard. In future articles I will use XMI to grab information about assets from UML diagrams, put hardware from a database back into a UML diagram, trace from one UML diagram to another, and a few other interesting tricks. But before we get to that, this first article will look at XMI in its raw form, as an XML document, and break down some of the key structural elements.
