Changes from UML 1.3 to 1.4

The most visible change in UML 1.4 is the addition of profiles, which allows a group of extensions to be collected together into a coherent set. The UML documentation includes a couple of example profiles. Together with this, there's greater formalism involved in defining a stereotype, and model elements can now have multiple stereotypes; they were limited to one stereotype in UML 1.3.

Artifacts were added to the UML. An artifact is a physical manifestation of a component, so, for example, Xerces is a component and all those copies of the Xerces jar on my disk drive are artifacts that implement the Xerces component.

Prior to 1.3, there was nothing in the UML meta-model to handle Java's package visibility. Now there is, and the symbol is "~".

UML 1.4 also made the stick arrowhead in interaction diagrams mark asynchronous, a rather awkward backward-incompatible change. That caught out a few people, including me.