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This can be modeled structurally, where the focus is more or less on entities and their properties. Or it can be modeled dynamically with a view to behavior, where the focus is on actions and action sequences.¹²⁷

From the perspective of entity, structural views include class diagrams connecting concept to concept, component diagrams connecting parts of the system, or deployment diagrams showing the dependencies between components – relating potential audience theatergoers to performances, to reservations, to their tickets. Taking the perspective of action, use case diagrams show actors and their actions, and sequence diagrams show the order in which actions occur – making tickets available, requesting a ticket, choosing a seat, making credit card charges, issuing a ticket.¹²⁸

Written text or speech alone could never model the world with the systematic rigor required by software development. UML models entities and actions diagrammatically, expressing meanings in a formal visual notation of standardized boxes, lines, and arrows, with textual labels differentiated by punctuation, underlining. The available modeling labels run to hundreds of concepts, each defined in exhaustive detail. Classifiers, behaviors, properties, relationships, constraints, events, data types, roles, messages – this is a complete ontology for the representation of possible human relations to entities and forms of action.

Indeed, UML covers the whole territory of human meaning, not just elemental concepts and their instantiation, but traversing all five functions that we address in this pair of books, from reference, to agency, structure, context, and even to stakeholders and their interests.^§AS2 For our function of reference, in UML the whole scene of human activity, and human–computer action, can be represented in a metamodel that roughly divides into what we would term entities and their properties (UML: structure) and actions (UML: behavior).¹²⁹

UML 1.0 was launched in 1997. By 2006, it was estimated that ten million software developers were using it, and 70 percent of software development organizations.¹³⁰ Version 2.5 was released in 2015. It is now a ubiquitous part of software requirements specification.¹³¹

Today, UML speaks with law-like authority: “The words SHALL, SHALL NOT, SHOULD, SHOULD NOT, MAY, NEED NOT, CAN and CANNOT in this specification shall be interpreted according to Annex H of ISO/IEC Directives, Part 2, Rules for the structure and drafting of International Standards, Sixth Edition 2011.”¹³² What unfolds across its many pages are rules for modeling anything or everything in the world, for the purposes of inserting software into some part of the process:

A model is always a model of something. The thing being modeled can generically be considered a system within some domain of discourse. The model then makes some statements of interest about that system, abstracting from all the details of the system that could possibly be described, from a certain point of view and for a certain purpose. For an existing system, the model may represent an analysis of the properties and behavior of the system. For a planned system, the model may represent a specification of how the system is to be constructed and behave.¹³³

The luminaries of UML barely get a mention in its voluminous documentation because the author is a collective, in this case a “task force” convened by the elusively named Object Management Group, an “international, open membership, not-for-profit technology standards consortium” based in Needham, Massachusetts.¹³⁴ Among the “what’s trending” topics on its website, unsurprisingly perhaps, are the Internet of Things and Cybersecurity.

Lest we be under any illusion that the world of shared meanings is a place for participatory design by the masses, or even where smart philosophers of ordinary things can make their mark on the world for the uncompromised purposes of human self-understanding, let alone disinterested pragmatic utility, we learn that OMG was founded in 1989 by eleven companies, including Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Sun Microsystems, American Airlines, and Data General. Their mutual interests lie in having machines and software that connect with each other in supply chains and with customers in markets. Another OMG standard, the Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Rules™, brings us close to the point.¹³⁵

OMG hosts four technical meetings per year, where the details of its standards are thrashed out. This is the strange, stateless way of semantic standards, software development, and the web. Here, in these communes of shared expertise, the agents of innovation in the representation of human meaning are anonymous to all other than each other. Voluntarily and without pay other than the regular salaries they earn working for their corporate sponsors, they serve global capitalism, offering up frameworks for the design of shared meanings. Dig deep and you’ll find names for mostly overlooked luminaries – Grady Booch, Ivar Jacobson, and James Rumbaugh, to name several – and ideas that stretch back several decades before the formal launch of UML.

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¹²⁴ Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides, 1994, Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software, Boston, MA: Addison-Wesley.

¹²⁵ Object Management Group, 2015, “OMG Unified Modeling Language (OMG UML),” Version 2.5 (www.omg.org/spec/UML/2.5/ ).

¹²⁶ International Organization for Standardization, 2012, “Information Technology: Object Management Group Unified Modeling Language (OMG UML),” Part 1: Infrastructure.

¹²⁷ Object Management Group, 2015, “OMG Unified Modeling Language (OMG UML),” Version 2.5 (www.omg.org/spec/UML/2.5/ ), pp. 12–13.

¹²⁸ James Rumbaugh, Ivar Jacobson, and Grady Booch, 2004, The Unified Modeling Language Reference Manual, Boston, MA: Addison-Wesley, pp. 18–34.

¹²⁹ Ibid., p. 544.

¹³⁰ Andrew Watson, 2008, “Visual Modelling: Past, Present and Future,” Needham, MA, p. 2.

¹³¹ Jon Holt, Simon A. Perry, and Mike Brownsword, 2012, Model-Based Requirements Engineering, Stevenage, UK: Institution of Engineering and Technology.

¹³² Object Management Group, 2015, “OMG Unified Modeling Language (OMG UML),” Version 2.5, p. 9.

¹³³ Ibid., p. 12.

¹³⁴ www.omg.org/gettingstarted/gettingstartedindex.htm

¹³⁵ www.omg.org/spec/SBVR/

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 122-125. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Unified Modeling Language §MS1.2b