Toolkit for Conceptual Modeling (TCM)

The Toolkit for Conceptual Modeling is a collection of software tools to present specifications of software systems in the form of diagrams, tables, trees, and the like. TCM offers editors for techniques used in Structured Analysis as well as editors for object-oriented (UML) techniques. For some of the behavior specification techniques, an interface to model checkers is offered. More in particular, TCM contains the following editors.

Generic editors for generic diagrams, generic tables and generic trees. All available icons can be used and no syntactic diagram constraints are checked.
Unified Modeling Language (UML) editors for static structure (i.e. class and object) diagrams, use-case diagrams, activity diagrams, statecharts, collaboration diagrams, component diagrams and deployment diagrams.
Structured Analysis (SA) editors for entity-relationship diagrams, data and event flow diagrams, state transition diagrams, function refinement trees, transaction-use tables and function-entity type tables.
Miscellaneous editors such as for JSD (process structure and network diagrams), recursive process graphs and transaction decomposition tables. These editors are no longer updated but they will remain available within TCM.

TCM is easy to use. Though there is a User's Guide, the editors are intended to be usable without having to refer to the user manual at all. The diagram techniques available in TCM are described in the following books:

The UML diagram techniques are discussed in:

R.J. Wieringa,
Design Methods for Reactive Systems: Yourdon, Statemate and the UML
Morgan Kaufmann, 2003, ISBN 1 558 60755 2.

R.J. Wieringa,
Requirements Engineering: Frameworks for Understanding
Wiley, 1996, ISBN 0 471 95884 0.

TCM runs on Unix and Linux platforms and also under Windows, running the CYGWIN/XFree86 environment. TCM is released under GNU Public License. The Developer's Guide contains information about the architecture of TCM. We maintain a wish list of current activities and future plans.

Send comments to tcm@cs.utwente.nl