Relationship reification: A temporal view

Abstract

Relationship reification is a well-known schema transformation in conceptual modeling of information systems. Traditionally, reification has been studied only for single state conceptual models. We show that these conceptual models and reification are too limited to cope effectively with some modeling situations. On the other hand, very little work has been done on reification in temporal models. In this paper we generalize previous work on reification, and propose three temporal reification kinds. We define the characteristics of the entity types, and of their intrinsic relationship types, produced by each reification kind. The result of our work may be applicable to any temporal conceptual model. We also show, by means of an example, the practical interest of our proposal.