In: 2004 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages - Human Centric Computing (VLHCC'04), September 26 - 29, 2004, Rome, Italy, pages 235-242. IEEE Press, September 2004.
Abstract: The recent major revision of the UML has introduced significant changes and additions. In particular, the metamodel portion underlying Activity Diagrams has been completely reengineered, with Activity being the central concept, the successor of ActivityGraph in UML 1.5. In this paper, a denotational and compositional semantics for Activities is defined as a mapping from Activities into Procedural Petri nets. The semantics excludes data type annotations and all features based on them, but includes all kinds of control flow, including non well-formed concurrency and, particularly, procedure calling.
Keywords: UML 2.0; Activity Diagrams; denotational and compositional semantics; modeling of web-services; work-flows; service-oriented architectures.