The Stereochemistry of Enterprise Objects

In ODP, an enterprise specification is expressed in terms of the definition of some set of communities, characterized by their community contracts. A community places constraints on its members, restricting the behaviour they can participate in. This may involve a stronger form of constraint than those which result from the traditional binding of objects at interfaces, which requires only that the communication between the objects has some observable properties. This paper discusses the different forms of constraints, and examines the range of forms that community construction may take. In particular, it examines the process of abstracting from a community to yield a community object, and then using this object to fill some role in a broader community. It shows that the role filling process needs to consider mappings and constraints between objects that fill other roles in the communities concerned.