The Z notation: a reference manual
The Z notation: a reference manual
Object-oriented modeling and design
Object-oriented modeling and design
The Unified Modeling Language user guide
The Unified Modeling Language user guide
A problem-oriented analysis of basic UML static requirements modeling concepts
Proceedings of the 14th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications
The entity-relationship model—toward a unified view of data
ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS) - Special issue: papers from the international conference on very large data bases: September 22–24, 1975, Framingham, MA
Communications of the ACM
A Formal Semantics for Object Model Diagrams
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
A Formal Approach to Use Cases and Their Relationships
«UML» '98 Selected papers from the First International Workshop on The Unified Modeling Language «UML»'98: Beyond the Notation
Formalization of the Whole-Part Relationship in the Unified Modeling Language
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
The Pragmatics of Model-Driven Development
IEEE Software
Implementing UML associations in Java: a slim code pattern for a complex modeling concept
Proceedings of the Workshop on Relationships and Associations in Object-Oriented Languages
Modeling issues: a survival guide for a non-expert modeler
MODELS'10 Proceedings of the 13th international conference on Model driven engineering languages and systems: Part II
Generating operation specifications from UML class diagrams: A model transformation approach
Data & Knowledge Engineering
Software and Systems Modeling (SoSyM)
MODELS'12 Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems
Journal of Database Management
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Association is one of the key concepts in UML that is intensively used in conceptual modeling. Unfortunately, in spite of the fact that this concept is very old and is inherited from other successful modeling techniques, a fully unambiguous understanding of it, especially in correlation with other newer concepts connected with association ends, such as uniqueness, still does not exist. This paper describes a problem with one widely assumed interpretation of the uniqueness of association ends, the restrictive interpretation, and proposes an alternative, the intentional interpretation. Instead of restricting the association from having duplicate links, uniqueness of an association end in the intentional interpretation modifies the way in which the association end maps an object of the opposite class to a collection of objects of the class at that association end. If the association end is unique, the collection is a set obtained by projecting the collection of all linked objects. In that sense, the uniqueness of an association end modifies the view to the objects at that end, but does not constrain the underlying object structure. This paper demonstrates how the intentional interpretation improves expressiveness of the modeling language and has some other interesting advantages. Finally, this paper gives a completely formal definition of the concepts of association and association ends, along with the related notions of uniqueness, ordering, and multiplicity. The semantics of the UML actions on associations are also defined formally.