Authors: Boris Kadish, Zinovy Diskin
Tags: 2003, conceptual modeling
We introduce a mathematical framework where a formal semantics for object identity can be built ir-respectively to computer related things like object identifiers, memory allocations etc. Then, on this base,we build formal semantics for a few major constructs of conceptual modeling (CM) such as association,aggregation, generalization,isA- andisPartOf-relationships. We also give a formal meaning to the twofundamental dichotomies of CM:objectsvs.valuesandentitiesvs.relationships.On the syntactical side, the language we use for specifying our formal semantic constructs is graph-basedand brief: specifications are directed graphs consisting only of three kinds of items––nodes, arrows andmarked diagrams. The latter are configurations of nodes and arrows closed in some technical sense andmarked with predicate labels taken from a predefined signature. We show that this format does provide auniversal abstract syntax for the entire CM-field. Then any particular CM-notation appears as a particularvisualization superstructure (concrete syntax) over the same basic specification format as above.Read the full paper here: https://reader.elsevier.com/reader/sd/pii/S0169023X03000478?token=FA18B1B80AB591ACEC65616AC330BB24B9C3D200D06B73532E3ED997F7F79D5222D09D2C69B206CA5BB7625F590A881C
