Edinburgh Napier University

  Current object-oriented (OO) modelling techniques emphasise the static aspects of data objects. Dynamics in general and collaborations between objects in particular tend to be poorly supported and are often treated separately. A full understanding of an object is hindered if we cannot easily grasp what it can do as well as what it is. We require a way of expressing collaborations. Our approach abstracts collaborations and suggests a method of integrating these abstractions into mainstream OO data definition languages (DDLs) thereby adding new modelling primitives. We argue that these are closer to real-world views of objects and are therefore more useful than the modelling contrivances in current use. We demonstrate how these primitives may be translated into DDLs which are easily mapped onto OO programming languages.