Toolkit for Conceptual Modeling (TCM)
User's Guide and Reference
for version 1.6

Frank Dehne
Roel J. Wieringa

Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science
Vrije Universiteit
De Boelelaan 1081a, 1081 HV Amsterdam
The Netherlands
E-mail: tcm@cs.vu.nl

Abstract:

The Toolkit for Conceptual Modeling (TCM) is a suite of graphical editors for a number of graphical notation systems that are used in software specification methods. The notations can be used to represent the conceptual structure of the software - hence the name of the suite.

This manual describes version 1.6 of TCM. TCM runs on Unix systems with X Windows. The TCM ftp site is ftp://ftp.cs.vu.nl/pub/tcm . The TCM home page is http://www.cs.vu.nl/~tcm . The use of TCM is free for education, academic research and other non-commercial purposes. This version of TCM contains graphical editors for several kinds of documents, namely diagrams, tables and trees.

• Editors are available for the following kinds of diagrams: generic graph diagrams, entity-relationship diagrams, class-relationship diagrams, state transition diagrams, recursive process graphs, data (and event) flow diagrams, and JSD process structure and system network diagrams.
• Editors are available for the following kinds of tables: generic tables, transaction decomposition tables, transaction-use tables and function-entity type tables.
• Editors are available for the following kinds of trees: generic textual trees and function refinement trees.

The current version of TCM supports constraint checking for single documents (e.g. name duplication, cycles in is-a relationships). TCM distinguishes built-in constraints (of which a violation cannot even be attempted) from immediate constraints (of which an attempted violation is immediately prevented) and soft constraints (against which the editor warns, after it is asked to check the drawing). The current version of TCM does not yet support constraint checking across documents for integrated conceptual modeling. Future versions of TCM will be enhanced with cross-diagram checking functions.

All editors share as much as possible of their user interface, which is designed to be usable without user manual. There is a simple on-line help facility and this user's guide annex reference is supplied with TCM in PostScript format and in HTML format, which can be read by a web browser.

This document describes the user interaction with TCM. It is intended to be a guide for both beginners and advanced users. The last appendix contains a mini-tutorial of the notation techniques supported by this version of TCM. Full information can be found in:
R.J. Wieringa. Requirements Engineering - Frameworks for Understanding. Wiley, 1996. ISBN 0 471 95884 0. http://www.cs.vu.nl/~roelw/books.html .