Authors: Roland Kaschek
Tags: 1996, conceptual modeling
Inheritance is one of the central concepts of object-oriented programming (OOP). In object-oriented design therefore a part of the knowledge worked out during object-oriented analysis (OOA) is mapped onto inheritance structures. Thus at the conceptual level an analog to inheritance in object oriented programming languages is needed. Recent approaches offer generalization as such analog. In this paper a definition of inheritance as a conceptual primitive is proposed. It is shown that generalization, aggregation and instantiation are special cases of inheritance. The latter however is not covered by the former concepts and so it is offered as a new basic primitive.Read the full paper here: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/BFb0019937
