A Generic Role Model for Dynamic Objects

Abstract

The role generic relationship for conceptual modeling relates a class of objects (e.g., persons) and classes of roles (e.g., students, employees) for those objects. The relationship is meant to capture temporal aspects of real-world objects while the common generalization relationship deals with their more static aspects. This paper presents a generic role model, where the semantics of roles is defined at both the class and the instance levels. The paper also discusses the interaction between the role relationship and generalization, and it attempts to clarify some of their similarities and differences.

A Replanning Algorithm for Decision Theoretic Hierarchical Planning: Principles and Empirical Evaluation

“…As we will see in the next section, this is possible in our model since roles are described as agents, i.e., they are attributed mental attitudes as well. Note that in many models, e.g., (Dahchour et al, 2002), roles do no play roles, and a role like project leader is modelled simply as specification of the employee role. However, this solution relies on a type specification hierarchy of roles and requires introducing dynamic reclassification.…”

Bridging Agent Theory and Object Orientation: Agent-Like Communication Among Objects

“…In [1,12,21,23] the concept of "role" has been proved extremely useful in programming languages for several reasons. These reasons range from dealing with the separation of concerns between the core behavior of an object and its interaction possibilities, reflecting the ontological structure of domains where roles are present, from modelling dynamic changes of behavior in a class to fostering coordination among components.…”

A role-based metamodeling approach to specifying design patterns

“…Since then, there has been considerable work done on using roles for objectoriented data modeling [1,3,8,11,14,15,16,18]. Sciore [14] and Gottlob et al [8] address hierarchy of roles.…”

“…Steimann [15] uses roles to define an object-oriented modeling language that does not have a metamodel. Dahchour et al [3] describe a general role model that consists of object classes and role classes where instances of object classes are instances of role classes.…”

“…A role has structural and behavioral properties [3,11,16,18]. Properties of a role may be inherited from other roles in a hierarchy [2,8,11,14,16,18].…”