Inducing metaassociations and induced relationships

Abstract

In the last years, UML has been tailored to be used as a domainspecific modelling notation in several contexts. Extending UML with this purpose entails several advantages: the integration of the domain in a standard framework; its potential usage by the software engineering community; and the existence of supporting tools. In previous work, we explored one particular issue of heavyweight extensions, namely, the definition of inducing metaassociations in metamodels as a way to induce the presence of specific relationships in their instances. Those relationships were intended by the metamodel specifier but not forced by the metamodel itself. However, our work was restricted to the case of induced associations. This paper proposes an extension to the general case in which inducing metaassociations may force the existence of arbitrary relationships at M1. To attain this goal, we provide a general definition of inducing metaassociation that covers all the possible cases. After revisiting induced associations, we show the inducement of the other relationship types defined in UML: association classes, generalization and dependencies.