Abstract
This chapter presents the use of the principle of generalisation/specialisation in conceptual modelling. Generalisation/specialisation is an abstraction principle allowing the definition of a class as a refinement of another class. The more general class is called a supertype, generalisation or parent class and the refined class is then called a subtype, specialisation or child class. With the advent of object-oriented analysis methods, many different ways of how to concretely use the generalisation/specialisation hierarchy in modelling were proposed. Most of the time, however, these proposals were not well integrated with the behavioural aspects in object-oriented modelling. Also today the definition of the generalisation/specialisation relationship is mostly formulated in the context of a static model only. In this chapter we will first address the definition of the concept from the perspective of the class diagram. Subsequently, Sect. 8.2 addresses the behavioural aspects of inheritance. To conclude Sect. 8.3 will address the question on when to use or not to use this construct.
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Notes
- 1.
For example in a class account, a method to register the withdrawal of money will need a parameter for the amount (e.g. of type Double), will return no value (return type void) and hence have a signature as follows: void withdraw (Double amount).
- 2.
Notice that in UML, events are not considered as classifiers and can therefore not be specialised.
- 3.
Public in the sense of visible to the IS-layer.
- 4.
An inherited method is public unless it has been specialised. In that case the inherited method is hidden and replaced by its specialised version.
- 5.
If the customer owning the bonus should be the same as the customer the loan is granted to, a multiple propagation constraint should be added. If not (e.g. children can make use of the bonus of their parents) then no constraint needs to be added.
- 6.
Service-level agreement.
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Snoeck, M. (2014). Inheritance. In: Enterprise Information Systems Engineering. The Enterprise Engineering Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10145-3_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10145-3_8
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