We screened a human osteoclast (OCL) cDNA expression library for OCL inhibitory factors and identified a clone that blocked both human and murine OCL formation and bone resorption by more than 60%. This clone was identical to human legumain, a cysteine endopeptidase. Legumain significantly inhibited OCL-like multinucleated cell formation induced by 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D(3) (1,25-(OH)(2)D(3)) ...

In the past years, many OCL tools achieved a transition of OCL from a language meant to constrain UML models to a universal constraint language applied to various modelling and metamodelling languages. However, OCL users still experience a discrepancy between the now highly extensible parsing and evaluation backend of OCL tools and the lack of appropriate frontend tooling like advanced OCL edit...

Collections, i. e., sets, bags, ordered sets and sequences, play a central role in UML and OCL models. Essential OCL operations like role navigation, object selection by stating properties and the first order logic universal and existential quantifiers base upon or result in collections. In this paper, we show a uniform representation of flat and nested, but typed OCL collections as well as str...

Based on our experience in implementing a type-checker for the Object Constraint Language (OCL), we observed that OCL is not suitable for constraining a system under development, because changes in the underlying class diagram unnecessarily invalidate the type correctness of constraints, while their semantic value does not change. Furthermore, the type system of OCL does not support templates. ...

Model processing tasks, like model checking, merging, slicing, and synthesis, need efficient and maintainable mechanisms to define models, as well as to query, compare and manipulate information in them. Although the Object Constraint Language (OCL) is primarily meant for expressing constraints for UML models, it can also be used for various model processing purposes. In this paper we discuss t...

Formal specification of UML models in OCL is essential to improve software quality. Owing to the use of OCL in precise model specification, its application has been looked in different perspectives such as early measurement of module complexity. Moreover, when UML class diagrams are complemented with OCL, the metrics collected from OCL specification can serve as an indicator of fault-prone comp...

The Model Development Tools Object Constraint Language (MDT OCL) project provides the building blocks for Model-Driven tools to weave OCL declarative specifications into software artifacts. We showcase some of these possibilities, taking as starting point a plug-in to visualize OCL abstract syntax trees (ASTs) in the form of annotated trees. This example motivates some practical tips about patt...

An Integrated OCL Development Environment (IDE4OCL) can significantly improve the pragmatics and praxis of OCL. We present the domain concepts, tool–level interactions with OCL and the use cases we identified in a systematic analysis of requirements for an IDE4OCL. The domain concepts is an important contribution of our work as it attempts to clarify inconsistencies in the relevant specificatio...

Checking models for correctness or compatibility using standard formal modeling techniques such as OCL has merits in abstraction and compactness. However, it is inconvenient for developers, since there are no standard mechanisms how to handle large and complex OCL constraints. Therefore, this paper presents an approach how to split complex OCL constraints into multiple ones by defining helper f...

An institution for the “Object Constraint Language” (OCL) is described. First, a general framework for building institutions for OCL-like languages is defined. This framework is instantiated for a substantial subset of OCL.