A Metaobject Protocol for Reifying Semantic Relationships into Reeective Systems

In object-oriented information systems, objects can be semantically related to interact and cooperate in collective tasks. From a structural point of view, such interactions can be conceptually modeled by semantic relationships (e.g., aggregation, materialization). However, only a few object-oriented systems or languages provide rst-class mechanisms for interobject relationships. A rst contribution of our doctoral research deenes and formalizes a relationship object model. A second contribution associates with the model a (meta)object architecture implementing the reiication of the relationship concept as a rst-class construct.