UML14 — fig 141 p205 and 7.13.2 p101 / just what sort of relationship is <

medium significance

The text for Figure 141 says "The package dependencies of the Actions chapter are shown in Figure 141." Then the diagram shows IntermediateActivities packages as dependent on StructuredActivities.

This conflicts with the text for fig 141, the text of section 12.1 page 265 says "The Intermediate and structured levels are orthogonal. Either can be used without the other or both can be used to support modeling that includes both concurrency and structured control constructs."

This statement implies that there is NO dependency between StructuredActivities and IntermediateActivities, none in either direction. Yet the Figure 175 says otherwise

Suggested resolution:

The root of this problem may be:

a. Merge is intuitively a symmetrical relationship, whereas it is defined in UML2 as directed.
b. In 7.13.1 on p 99, the description of the fundamental modeling element Package says "...a package can be merged with other packages." It is noteworthy that only one other package-to-package relationship was thought important enough to call out in the text introducing Package, and that is the containment ownership of nested packages. This prominence suggests that the meaning of 7.13.1 "... a package can be merged with other packages" is that "Any package can be merged wih any other package." or more exactly, a PackageMerge is valid between any two packages, without restriction.
c. Merge is defined in a way that makes it appear to be a dynamic function that takes two packages and produces a new package which is not the same as either of the two. This means it is not a relationship, but some kind of meta-operation, a very interesting but hairy concept.

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