A New Definition for the Concept of Role, and Why it Makes Sense

There is widespread agreement in the object community that the concept of role is important for object modelling, but there is little agreement about what is to be understood by " a role. " In a recent survey paper, Friedrich Steimann shows that the academics are very divided on this topic [12]. Standard bodies are also facing the issue of finding a proper definition for the concept of role. In particular, some members of the ISO group SC7/WG17, who is working on a standard for the ODP Enterprise Language, have found that the current definition of role in the RM-ODP Foundations [18, Def. 9.14] is very obscure if not flawed, so much that it does not help them. Within the OMG, the UML Revision Task Force found itself involved in a long and intense thread of email discussions after Jürgen Boldt of the OMG sent a message on August 11, 1999 where he said "