I am reading Autosar document and in one of the document (Autosar_TemplateModelingGuideline.pdf), it says that:
Composite aggregation, forming a whole-part relationship
Regular association, expressing a reference from the associating to
the associated model element
My question is: what is the difference between these two in practice? How do I have to interpret them in a class diagram, e.g. the Com Module in Autosar.:
The AUTOSAR COM module’s Configuration Overview
Consider Specified class ComGwSignalRef surrounded with a red rectangle. This class has a composition relation with ComGwSignalRef class and two regular association with ComGroupSignal and ComSignal.
How would you interpret this as a developer and how do you implement in C?
if regular association is a reference to an object that has independent life from ComGwSignalRef why designer do not use instanceRef here?
if it is not a reference, why did the designer not use composition?
PS. There is a concept in Autosar "InstanceRef" which is used for reference for independent object with independent lifecycle.
Maybe you should also consider the following:
The Com Configuration is an instance of the EcuC configuration meta-model as defined in the AUTOSAR_TPS_EcuConfiguration.
The ComGwSignalRef is of type EcucChoiceContainerDef, and as such, the two destination associations of ComSignal and ComGroupSignal have a meaning. Only one of these "choices" can be selected in the final configuration as a reference. In AUTOSAR metamodel, that is the definition of how EcucChoiceContainerDef works, in UML you might need here an additional constraint element to define the XOR relation of two associations.
An object can only be composed as part of one object.
A <>- C -<>B
In the diagram above C is composed in A and B. This would lead to the following instances:
a: A <>- c: C -<> b:B
Now the specific instance c is now part of both a and b.
What happen would with c if b goes out of scope? By the semantics it should be destroyed and not be destroyed (a still exists).
Or more pointed:
Take Alice,Bob, and Collar Bone as examples. Alice’s collar bone cannot be part of Bob.
UML is a modeling language and has not the same expressiveness as, say a C compiler. This is by design to simplify things.
Remember: All models are wrong, but some are useful. — George E. P. Box
Related
I tried to use the same object property between multiple classes, but I got a warning that the same object property has been set multiple times as follows, can you please let me know what is wrong with that and how to solve it? Does this restrict reasoning later on (i.e. confuse the reasoner since the same object property is set multiple times)?
Thanks
Contrary to the comments it actually is very problematic to use the same object property between multiple classes.
What you don't see in your visualization is that in RDF/OWL, the starting point of your relation arrows is modelled as rdfs:domain and the target point of the arrows is modelled as rdfs:range.
The semantic of an OWL class is that it is a set of individuals and rdfs:domain and rdfs:range specify the domain, respectively range of a relation. That is, they specify the sets of allowed values in subject, respectively object position of a triple with that relation in the predicate position.
If you express your example in RDF Turtle it would look like this:
:hasPart rdfs:domain :ClassA, :ClassB;
rdfs:range :ClassB, :ClassC, :ClassD.
This causes multiple problems:
Intersection
The semantic of multiple domains, respectively ranges, is the intersection of those classes, not the union!
Even if we disregard the relation between :ClassB and :ClassD, this means :hasPart is only allowed by individuals that are instances of class C and class D at the same time!
For example, lets say class A is "car", class B is "tire" and class C is "motor". Now you want to say that a car can have tires and motors but what you actually specify is that a car can only have things that are a motor and a tire at the same time!
Unwanted but allowed usage
If you fix the first problem but specifying the union instead of the intersection, it will be very messy in serialized RDF because you need a large amount of triples to represent OWL restrictions such as unions. But even if you do that, you could now connect an instance of class A with an instance of class D, which is not allowed in the image.
Solution
The solution is simple, just separate those relations, for example into :hasB, :hasC and :hasD, although in a real scenario you can probably find a more suitable naming scheme, where the "has" prefix is often not used. For example, in DBpedia, the property for the country of a city is expressed using dbo:country, not dbo:hasCountry.
This question is about Ontologies , I am implementing an ontology about potential physical attacks on wireless sensors as devices.
I created class Modification_Attack meaning attacks which modify in the sensor itself. I created Programming_Modification as an instance of this class, is this logical, is it better a sub-class or neither an instance nor a sub-class?
What is the main difference between instances and sub-classes?
This question isn't really unique to OWL ontologies; it comes up in object-oriented programming, and in set theory in mathematics. A class is a collection of its members. E.g.,
Person ≡ { person1, person2, … }
Suppose you have another class:
TallPerson ≡ { person63, person102, … }
A class A is a subclass of the class B if every element of A is also an element of B:
(A ⊆ B) ≡ (x ∈ A → x ∈ B)
So, for instance, if every member of TallPerson is also a member of Person, then TallPerson is a subclass of Person.
I created class Modification_Attack meaning attacks which modify in
the sensor itself.I created Programming_Modification as an instance of
this class , is this logical , is it better a sub-class or neither an
instance nor a sub-class?
This is a choice that you need to make. It really depends on the context and how you intend to use the ontology. If you're observing attacks in the wild and trying to categorize them, you probably want a subclass, but you'll want to have instances of Programming_Modification. That is, you'll want something like:
Programming_Modification ≡ { attack24, attack89, … }
But if you've got some other kind of use case, where you you want to talk about Programming_Modification as a single entity, then it might make more sense for it to be an individual.
I have been thinking through the same issue. And I think the same thing can be both an instance and a subclass depending on whether you plan to use it conceptually or not, which can be simplified to whether you would describe it using the or a.
For example, I am working on a materials ontology, where the main class is Material. A particular type of material is Steel. If I say the steel then steel an instance of Material. If I say a steel then Steel is a subclass of Material. Further, steel is an instance of Steel. And it would be more appropriate to also give it some kind of meaningful identifier like steel-1.
It all seems to come down whether you are using a term as a conceptual class or as a name for some instance of that class. In your case, I think it would probably be more appropriate to say Programming_Modification is a subclass as you could probably have many of such modifications which you would refer to as the first Programming_Modification or the second Programming_Modification . Would love to see what you came up with though if you have a solution.
ADT is the set of operations. ADT's are mathematical abstractions.
Does this mean that ADT are same as classes or am i confusing both together ?
The key to the difference is abstract. Think of an ADT more like an interface - a class with only method declarations, no implementation details.
As an example, a Stack ADT defines the basic stack operations like push and pop (but says nothing of how these operations should be implemented), while a Stack class would use either a linked-list or an array to actually implement these operations.
According to Code Complete, ADT is a collection of data and operations that work on that data.
Example for ADT:
List
Initialize list
Insert item in list
Remove item from list
Read next item from list
ADT form the foundation for the concept of classes. In languages that support classes, you can implement each abstract data type as its own class. Classes usually involve the additional concepts of inheritance and polymorphism. One way of thinking of a class is as an abstract data type plus inheritance and polymorphism.
An abstract data type (ADT) is a mathematical abstraction of a real world thing and can be implemented in a concrete data type in different languages.
An ADT defines operations for the given type and mathematically expresses their behaviour.
Concrete implementations of an ADT can differ from each other. In that way classes are implementing the ADT and methods implement operations.
Classes have a slightly different terminology than ADTs and add other characteristics, like:
they for example may live in packages
their members are called attributes and methods
attributes and methods have a certain visibility constraint
And methods:
can be abstract, too. but then, their behaviour isn't defined - only their method signature - an inheriting concrete class must provide an implementation
Don't confuse abstract data types with abstract classes in a concrete language.
A class is an implementation of an abstract data type (ADT).
ADTs are the way of classifying data structure by providing a minimal expected interface and set of Method
ADT's = set of values + Operation
Example Stack, Queue
I was explaining to a friend a few days ago the concept or inheritance and containers.
He has very little programming knowledge so it was really just a friendly chat.
During the conversation he came to me with a question that i just couldn't answer.
"Why cant you just have an array of the top level class, and add anything to it"
I know this is a bad idea having being told so before by someone far smarter but for the life of me i couldn't remember why.
I mean we do it all the time with inheritance.
Say we have class animal which is parent of cat and dog. If we need a container of both of these we make the array of type animal.
So lets say we didn't have that inheritance link, couldn't we just use the base object class and have everything in the one container.
No specific programming language.
Syntactically, there is no problem with this. By declaring an array of a specific type, you are giving implicit information about the contents of that array. You could well declare a contain of Object instances, but it means you lose all the type information of the original class at compile-time.
It also means that each time you get an object out of the array at runtime, the only field instances and methods you know exist are the fields/methods of Object (which arguably is a compile time problem). To use any of the fields and methods of more specific subclasses of the object, you'd have to cast.
Alternatively, to find out the specific class at runtime you'd have to use features like reflection which are overkill for the majority of cases.
When you take elements out of the container you want to have some guarantees as to what can be done with them. If all elements of the container are returned as instances of Animal (remember here that instances of Dog are also instances of Animal) then you know that they can do all the things that Animals can do (which is more things than what all Objects can do).
Maybe, we do it in programming for the same reason as in Biology? Reptiles and Whales are animals, but they are quite different.
It depends on the situation, but without context, it's definitely okay in most (if not all) object-oriented languages to have an array of a base type (that is, as long as they follow all the substitution principles) containing various instances of different derived types.
Object arrays exist in certain cases in most languages. The problem is that whenever you want to use them, you need to remember what type they were, and stay casting them or whatever.
It also makes the code very horrible to follow and even more horrible to extend, not to mention error prone.
Plant myplant = new Plant();
listOfAnimals.Add(myplant);
would work if the list is object, but you'd get a compile time error if it was Animal.
What distinguishes and object from a struct?
When and why do we use an object as opposed to a struct?
How does an array differ from both, and when and why would we use an array as opposed to an object or a struct?
I would like to get an idea of what each is intended for.
Obviously you can blur the distinctions according to your programming style, but generally a struct is a structured piece of data. An object is a sovereign entity that can perform some sort of task. In most systems, objects have some state and as a result have some structured data behind them. However, one of the primary functions of a well-designed class is data hiding — exactly how a class achieves whatever it does is opaque and irrelevant.
Since classes can be used to represent classic data structures such as arrays, hash maps, trees, etc, you often see them as the individual things within a block of structured data.
An array is a block of unstructured data. In many programming languages, every separate thing in an array must be of the same basic type (such as every one being an integer number, every one being a string, or similar) but that isn't true in many other languages.
As guidelines:
use an array as a place to put a large group of things with no other inherent structure or hierarchy, such as "all receipts from January" or "everything I bought in Denmark"
use structured data to compound several discrete bits of data into a single block, such as you might want to combine an x position and a y position to describe a point
use an object where there's a particular actor or thing that thinks or acts for itself
The implicit purpose of an object is therefore directly to associate tasks with the data on which they can operate and to bundle that all together so that no other part of the system can interfere. Obeying proper object-oriented design principles may require discipline at first but will ultimately massively improve your code structure and hence your ability to tackle larger projects and to work with others.
Generally speaking, objects bring the full object oriented functionality (methods, data, virtual functions, inheritance, etc, etc) whereas structs are just organized memory. Structs may or may not have support for methods / functions, but they generally won't support inheritance and other full OOP features.
Note that I said generally speaking ... individual languages are free to overload terminology however they want to.
Arrays have nothing to do with OO. Indeed, pretty much every language around support arrays. Arrays are just blocks of memory, generally containing a series of similar items, usually indexable somehow.
What distinguishes and object from a struct?
There is no notion of "struct" in OOP. The definition of structures depends on the language used. For example in C++ classes and structs are the same, but class members are private by defaults while struct members are public to maintain compatibility with C structs. In C# on the other hand, struct is used to create value types while class is for reference types. C has structs and is not object oriented.
When and why do we use an object as opposed to a struct?
Again this depends on the language used. Normally structures are used to represent PODs (Plain Old Data), meaning that they don't specify behavior that acts on the data and are mainly used to represent records and not objects. This is just a convention and is not enforced in C++.
How does an array differ from both,
and when and why would we use an
array as opposed to an object or a
struct?
An array is very different. An array is normally a homogeneous collection of elements indexed by an integer. A struct is a heterogeneous collection where elements are accessed by name. You'd use an array to represent a collection of objects of the same type (an array of colors for example) while you'd use a struct to represent a record containing data for a certain object (a single color which has red, green, and blue elements)
Short answer: Structs are value types. Classes(Objects) are reference types.
By their nature, an object has methods, a struct doesn't.
(nothing stops you from having an object without methods, jus as nothing stops you from, say, storing an integer in a float-typed variable)
When and why do we use an object as opposed to a struct?
This is a key question. I am using structs and procedural code modules to provide most of the benefits of OOP. Structs provide most of the data storage capability of objects (other than read only properties). Procedural modules provide code completion similar to that provided by objects. I can enter module.function in the IDE instead of object.method. The resulting code looks the same. Most of my functions now return stucts rather than single values. The effect on my code has been dramatic, with code readability going up and the number of lines being greatly reduced. I do not know why procedural programming that makes extensive use of structs is not more common. Why not just use OOP? Some of the languages that I use are only procedural (PureBasic) and the use of structs allows some of the benefits of OOP to be experienced. Others languages allow a choice of procedural or OOP (VBA and Python). I currently find it easier to use procedural programming and in my discipline (ecology) I find it very hard to define objects. When I can't figure out how to group data and functions together into objects in a philosophically coherent collection then I don't have a basis for creating classes/objects. With structs and functions, there is no need for defining a hierarchy of classes. I am free to shuffle functions between modules which helps me to improve the organisation of my code as I go. Perhaps this is a precursor to going OO.
Code written with structs has higher performance than OOP based code. OOP code has encapsulation, inheritance and polymorphism, however I think that struct/function based procedural code often shares these characteristics. A function returns a value only to its caller and only within scope, thereby achieving encapsulation. Likewise a function can be polymorphic. For example, I can write a function that calculates the time difference between two places with two internal algorithms, one that considers the international date line and one that does not. Inheritance usually refers to methods inheriting from a base class. There is inheritance of sorts with functions that call other functions and use structs for data transfer. A simple example is passing up an error message through a stack of nested functions. As the error message is passed up, it can be added to by the calling functions. The result is a stack trace with a very descriptive error message. In this case a message inherited through several levels. I don't know how to describe this bottom up inheritance, (event driven programming?) but it is a feature of using functions that return structs that is absent from procedural programming using simple return values. At this point in time I have not encountered any situations where OOP would be more productive than functions and structs. The surprising thing for me is that very little of the code available on the internet is written this way. It makes me wonder if there is any reason for this?
Arrays are ordered collection of items that (usually) are of the same types. Items can be accessed by index. Classic arrays allow integer indices only, however modern languages often provide so called associative arrays (dictionaries, hashes etc.) that allow use e.g. strings as indices.
Structure is a collection of named values (fields) which may be of 'different types' (e.g. field a stores integer values, field b - string values etc.). They (a) group together logically connected values and (b) simplify code change by hiding details (e.g. changing structure layout don't affect signature of function working with this structure). The latter is called 'encapsulation'.
Theroretically, object is an instance of structure that demonstrates some behavior in response to messages being sent (i.e., in most languages, having some methods). Thus, the very usefullness of object is in this behavior, not its fields.
Different objects can demonstrate different behavior in response to the same messages (the same methods being called), which is called 'polymorphism'.
In many (but not all) languages objects belong to some classes and classes can form hierarchies (which is called 'inheritance').
Since object methods can work with its fields directly, fields can be hidden from access by any code except for this methods (e.g. by marking them as private). Thus encapsulation level for objects can be higher than for structs.
Note that different languages add different semantics to this terms.
E.g.:
in CLR languages (C#, VB.NET etc) structs are allocated on stack/in registers and objects are created in heap.
in C++ structs have all fields public by default, and objects (instances of classes) have all fields private.
in some dynamic languages objects are just associative arrays which store values and methods.
I also think it's worth mentioning that the concept of a struct is very similar to an "object" in Javascript, which is defined very differently than objects in other languages. They are both referenced like "foo.bar" and the data is structured similarly.
As I see it an object at the basic level is a number of variables and a number of methods that manipulate those variables, while a struct on the other hand is only a number of variables.
I use an object when you want to include methods, I use a struct when I just want a collection of variables to pass around.
An array and a struct is kind of similar in principle, they're both a number of variables. Howoever it's more readable to write myStruct.myVar than myArray[4]. You could use an enum to specify the array indexes to get myArray[indexOfMyVar] and basically get the same functionality as a struct.
Of course you can use constants or something else instead of variables, I'm just trying to show the basic principles.
This answer may need the attention of a more experienced programmer but one of the differences between structs and objects is that structs have no capability for reflection whereas objects may. Reflection is the ability of an object to report the properties and methods that it has. This is how 'object explorer' can find and list new methods and properties created in user defined classes. In other words, reflection can be used to work out the interface of an object. With a structure, there is no way that I know of to iterate through the elements of the structure to find out what they are called, what type they are and what their values are.
If one is using structs as a replacement for objects, then one can use functions to provide the equivalent of methods. At least in my code, structs are often used for returning data from user defined functions in modules which contain the business logic. Structs and functions are as easy to use as objects but functions lack support for XML comments. This means that I constantly have to look at the comment block at the top of the function to see just what the function does. Often I have to read the function source code to see how edge cases are handled. When functions call other functions, I often have to chase something several levels deep and it becomes hard to figure things out. This leads to another benefit of OOP vs structs and functions. OOP has XML comments which show up as tool tips in the IDE (in most but not all OOP languages) and in OOP there are also defined interfaces and often an object diagram (if you choose to make them). It is becoming clear to me that the defining advantage of OOP is the capability of documenting the what code does what and how it relates to other code - the interface.