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Using Entity Roles to Test Process Descriptions

Recall that in our summaries of design we described how definitions of key roles of entities in process were used in Section 4.1.4 to cue more detailed process descriptions. One of the entity roles was for the entity, of sort S, to be originated in a process, P - denoted by . Each process is defined by the predicate , where Or is the set of entities actually originated when the process is run. However, our method for generating process definitions doesn't guarantee that all the entities which should play a role in the process actually do so. Therefore we construct tests for non-adherence to these roles which can be applied to a process which has run to completion. A simplified version of one of these is:

which detects a problem with the set of originated entities, Or, if there is an origination role for an entity of sort S but no entity, E, in Or which is in sort S.



Dave Stuart Robertson
Tue Jul 7 10:13:45 BST 1998