SACM11 — Property Inherence Hierarchy

A simple, natural and appropriate set of properties would have Property (abstract?) inheriting from Assertion (or less preferably ModelElement) and having ModelElementProperty, RepesentedObjectProperty, Event, and Timing inheriting from it (Property) and appropriately associated. Artifacts and DomainObjects would use RepesentedObjectProperty’s. The two classes of properties are needed to allow properties associated with a model element and those associated with what it represents to be distinguished. Likewise ModelElementEvent and RepesentedObjectEvent inherit from Event. What type of event timing an instance is relevant to will be clear from what it is associated with. CM events and properties for both model elements and what they represent could be treated within this approach.

Alternately, a usable set of properties could have Property inheriting from ModelElement and having ModelElementProperty, ArtifactProperty, DomainObjectProperty, Event, and Timing inheriting from it and appropriately associated. The three classes of properties are needed to allow properties associated with a model element and what it represents to be distinguished. Likewise ModelElementEvent, ArtifactEvent, and DomainObjectEvent inherit from Event. What type of event timing is relevant to will be clear from what it is associated with. CM events and properties could be treated likewise.

Deferred as still valid for SACM

RTF agree that the standard needs to make a sharper distinction between ‘uncontestable’ properties and assertions made (e.g. about evidence). In addition, there needs to be a clear distinction between properties of model elements and properties (assertions) concerning domain objects being represented. All assertions should inherit off a based Assertion class. To achieve this in SACM 1.1 would require a major reorganization of the standard that would significantly break backwards compatibility.