The unified modeling language

This volume contains mainly the revised versions of papers presented at the wo- shop <>'98, "Beyond the Notation", that took place in Mulhouse, France on June 3-4, 1998. We thank all those that have made this possible, and particularly all the people in Mulhouse that worked hard to make this meeting a success, with such a short delay between the announcement and the realization. We are specially grateful to Nathalie Gaertner, who put in a tremendous amount of effort in the initial preparation of the workshop. We were pleasantly surprised of the quality of the submitted material and of the level of the technical exchanges at the Mulhouse meeting. More than one hundred attendees, from about twenty different countries, representing the main actors in the UML research and development scene, gathered in Mulhouse for two full study days. We would like to express our deepest appreciation to the authors of submitted - pers, the editorial committee for this volume, the program committee for the initial workshop, the external referees, and many others who contributed towards the final contents of this volume. April 1999 Jean Bézivin Pierre-Alain Muller