1.14. Bibliographic Notes

A summarized description of the three modeling spaces and the UML diagrams that appear in these modeling spaces appears in an article I wrote based on this book. See the Australian Computer Society's official publication, InformationAge, October–November 2001, “Demystifying the UML,” pp. 56–61 [Unhelkar 2001].

In my earlier process work, and many times in practice, I have compared the three dimensions of a process with white clouds. This is a phenomenon I have observed during my many flights home to Sydney from the West Coast (San Francisco or Los Angeles). The journey is entirely over the Pacific Ocean and there is hardly any land in sight. Formed by the unhindered marriage of the sunrays with the Pacific Ocean, these white clouds stretch in abundance for thousands of miles—as far as the eye can see, or the plane can fly. They represent a process whose growth is relaxed yet certain—providing an ideal model for my process-based work. Osho [1978], quoted below, provides one of the best philosophical descriptions of white clouds that has benefited my own process thinking:

A white cloud is a mystery—the coming, the going, the very being of it. A white cloud exists without any roots . . . but still it exists, and exists abundantly.. . . All dimensions belong to it, all directions belong to it. Nothing is rejected. Everything is, exists, in a total acceptability.

The other interesting aspect of the above-mentioned journey is that you pass over the International Date Line. It is a funny experience to grow a day younger or a day older (depending on the direction of your flight), literally within seconds.

For a list of some popular CASE tools that help create UML-based models, see UML CASE Tools.