Key Grammatical Concepts

The SysML, like its parent the UML, is a visual language where diagrams are central to the communication strategy of the language. Even though the emphasis of the language is on this visual codification and transmission of ideas, the language also has facilities to express ideas textually, which is an important complement to the visual mechanisms. A number of elements, such as the Requirement element, have a visual form, but the details of the Requirement are written in a property called Requirement 'text' as shown in this diagram.

Enterprise Architect has also been carefully designed to respect the way in which different users work with information. The design team works closely with its community of users and is aware that some users work better with diagrammatic visualization and others with text. Many of the tools available in Enterprise Architect have been designed with these different types of user in mind. For example, in the Requirements Management discipline, users are often more familiar with working in documents and spreadsheets. To cater for this Enterprise Architect has a number of views that users can switch to, that allow them to enter, edit and manage Requirements through these types of interface. One of these tools is the Specification Manager, which provides a flexible and familiar way of working with Requirements from both a document-based view and a spreadsheet view, allowing Requirements to be viewed, created and managed with ease.