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Inheritance as a conceptual primitive

  • Session 9: Capturing Design Information
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Book cover Conceptual Modeling — ER '96 (ER 1996)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 1157))

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Abstract

Inheritance is one of the central concepts of object-oriented programming (OOP). In object-oriented design therefore a part of the knowledge worked out during object-oriented analysis (OOA) is mapped onto inheritance structures. Thus at the conceptual level an analog to inheritance in object oriented programming languages is needed. Recent approaches offer generalization as such analog. In this paper a definition of inheritance as a conceptual primitive is proposed. It is shown that generalization, aggregation and instantiation are special cases of inheritance. The latter however is not covered by the former concepts and so it is offered as a new basic primitive.

A draft version of this paper has been presented at the Workshop ‘Semantics in Databases’ in Prague,ŘeŽ, January 13–16, 1995.

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  1. Institut für Informatik, UniversitÄt Klagenfurt, österreich

    Roland Kaschek

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  1. Roland Kaschek
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Bernhard Thalheim

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© 1996 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Kaschek, R. (1996). Inheritance as a conceptual primitive. In: Thalheim, B. (eds) Conceptual Modeling — ER '96. ER 1996. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1157. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0019937

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0019937

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-61784-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-70685-4

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