On the satisfiability of dependency constraints in entity-relationship schemata
Information Systems
Entity-Relationship Modeling: Foundations of Database Technology
Entity-Relationship Modeling: Foundations of Database Technology
On the implication problem for cardinality constraints and functional dependencies
Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence
On the Interaction Between ISA and Cardinality Constraints
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Data Engineering
Coping with Inconsistent Constraint Specifications
ER '01 Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling: Conceptual Modeling
Graph-Theoretical Methods to Construct Entity-Relationship Databases
WG '95 Proceedings of the 21st International Workshop on Graph-Theoretic Concepts in Computer Science
Unified Modeling Language Reference Manual, The (2nd Edition)
Unified Modeling Language Reference Manual, The (2nd Edition)
Consistency problems in ER-schemas for database systems
Information Sciences: an International Journal - Special issue: Information technology
Reasoning on UML class diagrams
Artificial Intelligence
Soft constraints and heuristic constraint correction in entity-relationship modelling
Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Semantics in databases
Management of Correctness Problems in UML Class Diagrams Towards a Pattern-Based Approach
International Journal of Information System Modeling and Design
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UML class diagrams are probably the most important, well-established, UML model. They play an essential role in the analysis and design of complex systems. UML class diagrams allow the specification of constraints such as cardinality constraints, class hierarchy constraints and inter-association constraints. Constraints extend the expressivity of class diagrams, but enable the specification of unsatisfiable class diagrams, i.e., class diagrams that have no finite non-empty instance world. Nowadays, UML case tools still do not check satisfiability of class diagrams, and implementation languages still do not enforce design level constraints. But the expectation is that in the future, and in particular with the prevalence of the Model Driven Engineering approach,all information in a design model will be effective in its successive models. In this paper, we present an algorithm for testing the satisfiability of UML class diagrams that include class hierarchies with “disjoint/overlapping” and “complete/incomplete” constraints. The algorithm is based on a reduction to a previous algorithm of Lenzerini and Nobili that was applied only to ER-diagrams without class hierarchies. Our algorithm is simple and feasible since it adds in the worst case only a linear amount of entities to the original diagram. It improves over previous elaboration of the Lenzerini and Nobili method that require the addition of an exponential number of new entities to the original diagram. An implementation of our method within a UML case tool is currently under development.