A Radical Revision of UML's Role Concept
UML 2000 - The Unified Modeling Language. Advancing the Standard. Third International Conference, York, UK, October 2000, Proceedings, 1939, page 194--209. Springer, (2000)Abstract
UML's current definition of the role concept comes with many
problems, not the least being that it is difficult to understand and communi-
cate. This paper proposes a revised UML metamodel building on a much sim-
pler role definition. Moreover, it replaces the rather unusual notions of
association role and association end role as well as the rarely used association
generalization with the more popular concept of overloading, thereby leading
to a considerable reduction in the number of modelling concepts. Despite the
rather radical nature of the proposed alterations, no changes in UML notation
become necessary. However, a notable change in modelling style including in
particular a clearer separation of structure and interaction diagrams are among
the likely effects of the proposed revision.
