Ownership as a conceptual modeling construct

Authors: James Geller, Li-min Liu, Michael Halper, Yehoshua Perl

Tags: 2007, conceptual modeling

Ownership is a relationship that pervades many aspects of our lives, from the personal to the economic, and is partic-ularly important in the realm of the emerging electronic economy. As it is understood on an intuitive level, ownershipexhibits a great deal of complexity and carries a rich semantics with respect both to the owner and the possession. A formalmodel of an ownership relationship that inherently captures varied ownership semantics is presented. This ownership rela-tionship expands the repertoire of available conceptual data modeling primitives. It is built up from a set of characteristicdimensions, namely, exclusiveness, dependency, documentation, transferability, and inheritance, each of which focuses ona specific aspect of ownership semantics. The data modeler has the ability to make a variety of choices along these fivedimensions, and thus has access to a wide range of available ownership features in a declarative fashion. These choicesultimately impose various constraints (specified in OCL) on the states of data objects and their respective ownership activ-ities, including transactions such as acquiring and relinquishing ownership. To complement the formal aspects of the own-ership model and enhance its usability, we present a graphical ownership notation that augments the Unified ModelingLanguage (UML) class diagram formalism. An implementation of the ownership relationship in a commercial object-ori-ented database system is discussed

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