Which actual entity does this element represent?

In the context of a UML model designed to capture the elements of a real-world business enterprise, the class Employee appears in the fragment of a class diagram as shown below:

Which actual entity does this element represent?
A . An employee of the company
B . The set of all employees of the company
C . An anonymous employee of the company
D . A diagram of an employee of the company

Answer: B

Explanation:

In the context of a UML (Unified Modeling Language) model, the class named ‘Employee’ represents a template for all entities that are classified as employees within the business enterprise model.

Therefore, the correct answer is:

B. The set of all employees of the company

The term ‘Employee’ in the class diagram is a UML Class, which is defined as a description of a set of objects that share the same attributes, operations, relationships, and semantics (UML 2.5 specification, section 9.2). A class in UML is a blueprint from which individual objects (instances of the class) are created. It is not a representation of any single employee, an anonymous employee, or a diagram of an employee, but rather the conceptual model that defines the properties and behaviors of all employee instances in the domain being modeled.