Overview

In general, a Profile diagram has been introduced in UML 2.0 to display the usage of profiles. It is an extensibility mechanism that allows extending and customizing UML. To be more specific, the Profiles package contains mechanisms that allow metaclasses from existing metamodels to be extended to adapt them for different purposes.

Purpose

A Profile Diagram extends UML by adding new building blocks, creating new properties, and specifying new semantics so that the language would be suitable to the specific domain, for example, medicine, financial services, or engineering.

Usage

A Profile diagram extends UML to allow the use of:

  • user-defined stereotypes
  • meta attributes
  • constraints. 

Summary

Profile diagrams are valuable because they allow for adaptation of the UML metamodel for:

  • different platforms (e.g., Java Platform, Microsoft .NET Framework, Enterprise Edition (Java EE), etc.) 
  • domains (e.g., business process modeling, medical applications, service-oriented architecture)

If the Class, Data Type, Primitive Type, Enumeration, Association, Direct Association, Generalization are not available on the diagram palette, make sure you are working in the Expert mode.


Example of Profile diagram

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