Comments AUI class diagram September 27th version

Dear colleagues,

here are my notes regarding the latest AUI class diagram. I have
attached a class diagram that just illustrates my change requests and
does not cover the entire AUI.

I would like to propose:

- to consider requirement GR5 “Mappability” by two classes “Entity” and
“Mapping”. A Mapping defines a relation between source and target
entities. An Entity contains an unique identifier that can be referred
to. In the attached diagram i have aggregated Entities into
UserInterfaceModel but i would prefer to see a Task to be derived from
an Entity as well, so that a task can be mapped to e.g. an
AbstractInteractionUnit.

- that Documentation can be linked to a Model and all classes and
attributes that we consider as documentation are derived from this class
to better separate machine-processable data from human-processable data.
The latter might not be relevant at system run-time.

- an AbstractInteractionUnit can aggregate Behavior conforming to
specific requirement 3

- that Behavior is a special kind of a mapping and optional

- consider the composite pattern
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composite_pattern and therefore explicitly
consider the “leaf” as an abstract class (e.g. ElementaryIU)

I am continuously trying to relate each proposal of the AUI class
diagram to our AUI implementation and realized that - in general - we
would require less effort in adapting our model to the W3C one if new
concepts are introduced by sub-classes instead of attributes. From the
implementation point of view it is much easier to introduce a new class
into an existing hierarchy than new attributes that would require code
changes in the existing classes. Further on, abstract classes can be
used as elegant “extension points” for all concepts that have not been
considered in the W3C AUI. Therefore i would vote against the “minimize
abstract classes requirement”.

Regards,
Sebastian

-- 
Sebastian Feuerstack
Department of Computer Science
Federal University of Sao Carlos - Brazil
http://www.feuerstack.org

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