RE: isa and hasa in UML

Reading this discussion, I could not resist:

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Francis McCabe [mailto:fgm@fla.fujitsu.com]
 ... 

> That way you end up with the pretty(?) diagrams, but using guillemots 
> <> everywhere.

In another sense, Guillemots are birds, one of whose (extinct) species
was the flightless Great Auk, which was the original "penguin".
Taxonomically, the Great Auk is counted as a bird (and as a guillemot)
because it shares many properties with the other birds and even more
with the other guillemots.



That's not very helpful, but I'm not sure that the "real" taxonomy
approach, of admitting one is trying to retrospectively classify things
that exist independently of the classifier, isn't sometimes useful in
our work.


Peter

------------------------------------------
Peter Furniss
Chief Scientist, Choreology Ltd

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Received on Monday, 2 June 2003 05:39:20 UTC