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Encyclopedia of Database Systems pp 2524–2525Cite as

Object Constraint Language

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Synonyms

OCL

Definition

The Unified Modeling Language (UML) includes a textual language called Object Constraint Language (OCL). OCL allows users to navigate class diagrams, to formulate queries, and to restrict class diagrams with integrity constraints. From a practical perspective, the OCL may be viewed as an object-oriented version of the Structured Query Language (SQL) originally developed for the relational data model. From a theoretical perspective, OCL may be viewed as a variant of first-order predicate logic with quantifiers on finite domains only. OCL has a well-defined syntax [1, 3] and semantics [2].

Key Points

The central language features in OCL are: navigation, logical connectives, collections and collection operations.

  • Navigation: The navigation features in OCL allow users to determine connected objects in the class diagram by using the dot operator “. ”. Starting with an expression expr of start class C, one can apply a property propC of class Creturning, for example,...

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Recommended Reading

  1. OMG (ed.). OMG object constraint language specification. OMG, 2007. www.omg.org.

  2. Richters M, Gogolla M. On formalizing the UML object constraint language OCL. In: Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling; 1998. p. 449–64.

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  3. Warmer J, Kleppe A. The object constraint language: getting your models ready for MDA. Boston: Addison-Wesley, Reading; 2003.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany

    Martin Gogolla

Authors
  1. Martin Gogolla
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Martin Gogolla .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Ling Liu

  2. University of Waterloo School of Computer Science, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. Tamer Özsu

Section Editor information

  1. Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, USA

    David W. Embley

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Gogolla, M. (2018). Object Constraint Language. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_810

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