Generic Relationships in Information Modeling

Generic relationships are powerful abstraction mechanisms that help in better organizing information during the analysis phase of problem resolution. Recent research in conceptual modeling has studied new generic relationships that naturally model complex situations whose semantics escapes direct representation with classical relationships (generalization, classi cation, and aggregation). For full bene t, these relationships should be made available in object languages and systems as primitives for developing conceptual models of applications. Unfortunately, only classical relationships are supported by popular object models and existing implementations fail to accurately capture the semantics of other generic relationships. This paper characterizes the common semantics of generic relationships, presents some important generic relationships, and reviews several mechanisms for implementing generic relationships, with a particular emphasis on metaclasses.