Property covering: A powerful construct for schema derivations

Covering is a well-known relationship in semantic and object-oriented models that holds when a class is the union of a collection of subclasses. Covering has been studied in the past only for entity classes. In this paper, we study covering for properties, and we introduce a new relationship, called property covering. Property covering holds when a property is the union of a collection of subproperties. Property covering allows to (i) partition a property into subproperties, (ii) express property value refinement, and (iii) express a particular form of negative information. We demonstrate that property covering is a powerful conceptual modeling mechanism, and we use it to provide a set of inference rules for schema derivations.