PartOver anti-pattern

Full name

Part Composing Overlapping Wholes

Type

Logical

Feature

Part-Whole

Description

A part composing two or more whole types whose extension overlap. The sum of the meronymics’ upper bound cardinalities of the whole end must be greater or equal to 2 or at least one of them be unlimited.

Justification

This structure is usually too permissive. It is often the case that some of the whole types should be disjoint or set as exclusive in the context of a single part instance.

Contraints

  1. Let M be the set of identified meronymic relations, wholeEnd(m) the function that returns the association end connected to the whole of a meronymic relation m, and upper(p) the function that return the upper bound cardinality of a property p, then:

    \[(\sum_{m \in M}^{} upper(wholeEnd(mn)) \geq 2\]

  2. Let O be the set of whole types that Part composes, then:

    \[\exists x, y \in O \ | \ overlap(x, y)\]
Examples

Examples

Refactoring Plans

  1. [OCL] Exclusiveness*: choose this option to forbid the same individual to play multiple roles w.r.t the same part instance. Create an OCL invariant according to the template:

    context Part
    inv: self.over1.oclAsType(Supertype)->asSet()->excludesAll(
    self.over2.oclAsType(Agent)->asSet() and
    self.over1.oclAsType(Supertype)->asSet()->excludesAll(
    self.over3.oclAsType(Agent)->asSet() and
    self.over2.oclAsType(Supertype)->asSet()->excludesAll(
    self.over3.oclAsType(Agent)->asSet())

  2. [OCL] Partially exclusiveness: choose this option to set a subset of the whole types as exclusive.

  3. [Mod/New] Disjoint whole: Enforce whole types to be disjoint through the creation or alteration of a disjoint generalization set.

    • Note: to make all types exclusive, every binary combination should be explicitly ruled out

References:

Prince Sales, Tiago. (2014). Ontology Validation for Managers.