Conceptual modelling patterns for roles

Abstract

Roles are meant to capture dynamic and temporal aspects of real-world objects. The role concept has been used with many semantic meanings: dynamic class, aspect, perspective, interface or mode. This paper identifies common semantics of different role models found in the literature. Moreover, it presents a set of conceptual modelling patterns for the role concept that include both the static and dynamic aspects of roles. In particular, we propose the Role as Entity Types conceptual modelling pattern to deal with the full role semantics. A conceptual modelling pattern is aimed at representing a specific structure of knowledge that appears in different domains. The use of these patterns eases the definition of roles in conceptual schemas. In addition, we describe the design of schemas defined by using the patterns in order to implement them in any object-oriented language. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.