Figure R.15 - Beginning of the Entity Identification ABE Model

To eliminate the redundancy and instability within the model caused by the repeated modeling of similar identification structures and by introducing subclasses for each way that an entity can be identified, the EntitySpecification – Entity pattern is used. Here, the “EntitySpecification” part of the pattern will take the form of a specification for identifying Entities, and the “Entity” part of the pattern will take the form of an object that can be used to identify entities.<br/>Therefore, applying this pattern yields the beginning of a model for Entity identification, as shown in Figure EI.02 – Beginning of the Entity Identification ABE Model below.<br/>An EntityIdentificationSpec defines the attributes that are shared by every instance of a related EntityIdentification. (and methods, constraints, relationships and behavior in the system view) of an EntityIdentification object. Note that methods and constraints (as specified in OCL) are useful for specifying “static” behavior (e.g., functionality that can be defined at design time). Thus, “behavior” refers to dynamic functionality and runtime considerations that are not easy to represent in a class model. For example, the directive to instantiate an object only in response to a run-time exception is easy to conceptualize as a constraint, but is difficult to model in UML. Other examples include the specification of pre- and post-conditions and other contract related data.<br/>