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This page contains an archived post to the Design Forum (formerly called the Flexible Java Forum) made prior to February 25, 2002.
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Message:
Composition, Aggregation, Membership, Assembly, . . .
Posted by Lois Goldthwaite on 03 Dec 1998, 7:55 AM
For a short discussion on this topic that packs in more than you ever
wanted to know about it, look at an article by Brian
Hendersen-Sellers in JOOP, the Nov-Dec. 97 issue. I heard Brian make a talk on the OPEN methodology and modeling
language, where he
distinguished between aggregation/composition (a whole made up
of two or more parts in some configuration
where the relationships are important -- e.g. you have to put the parts
of a sailboat together in the right order for it to be useful),
membership (a whole made up of one or more parts but in no particular
relationship to each other -- e.g. a club of people), and containment (I
suppose here there is even less connection between the parts, as
with a bus filled with passengers). The OPEN notation includes symbols for each of the above. The one for
aggregation/composition is a circle with a plus sign in it, intended
to resemble a Phillips-head screw used to assemble things together.
UML's open and filled diamonds don't get much respect in OPEN circles. The above-mentioned article also discusses relationships like
stuff-object (a bicycle is partly steel, cappuccino is partly
milk), portion-object (a slice of bread is the same substance as
the entire loaf), place-area (Austin is part of Texas), member-bunch
(a tree is part of a forest), member-partnership (an invariant
form of the previous category; Ginger and Fred are a dance couple).
The bibliography for the article lists sources for further reading,
including one called "A Taxonomy of Part-Whole Relations."
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