Causalities - when objects behave

Describing causalities (or reactions) is an even more advanced approach. Causalities describe the cause or reason, which activates a certain behavior (action). Describing causalities reduces the human interaction in a system or application, because the application can detect automatically, what is necessary to do and when.

The methods of describing causalities are not yet developed very well. Three ways of describing causalities are considered in TM:

• Describing causalities as state or state transitions that cause an action (activating a rule). E.g. when a person has been born (cause) it must be registered in the birth register (action).

• Describing causalities as consequence of history e.g. sending a mail (action) when a person has birthday. In fact, this does not differ in principle from the first topic, but time plays a special role and thus, it becomes useful to consider temporal causalities separately.

• Often, causalities are reflected in terms of process events as an individual object has been updated, created or deleted. Usually, process events cannot be expressed in terms of object state transitions and are, typically, considered as internal or system events.

There are not so many areas dealing with causalities compared to static concept definitions. On the other hand the introduction of process events in database systems and GUI environments has already shown powerful features based on event handling.