Enhancing UML Class Diagram Abstraction with Page Rank Algorithm and Relationship Abstraction Rules

Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) alleviates the cognitive complexity and effort through the refinement and abstraction of consecutive models. In MDE, models should accurately and completely accommodate the expected data, information and knowledge in requirement specification following a series of refinement and abstraction. Proper abstraction starting from Class Diagrams lays the foundation for effective reuse and efficient manipulation of contained data, information and knowledge. Most current model abstraction approaches assume the scenarios with interaction of stakeholders for providing the key entities and thereafter focus on the relationship abstraction. However few work is done on unguided abstraction where stakeholders don’t know the key entities. Towards resolving the abstraction covering both automatic locating of representative entities and abstracting of link among these entities in Class Diagrams, we proposed a combination of class rank algorithm which prioritizes classes and relationship abstraction rules which heuristically determine the representative semantics of relationships towards improving the efficiency and effectiveness of class abstraction.