Linking UML and MDD through UML Profiles: a Practical Approach based on the UML Association

In a model-driven development context, the definition (or selection) of an appropriate modeling language is a crucial task. omg, in the model-driven architecture specification, recommends the use of uml for model-driven developments. however, the lack of semantic precision in uml has led to different model-driven approaches proposing their own domain-specific modeling languages in order to introduce their modeling needs. this paper focuses on customizing the uml association in order to facilitate its application in model-driven development environments. to do this, a well-defined process is defined to integrate the abstract syntax of a domain-specific modeling language that supports a precise semantics for the association construct in uml by means of the automatic generation of a uml profile. finally, a brief example shows how the results obtained by the application of the proposed process can generate software products through a real model compilation tool