Introduction to Building Blocks and Their Container
With HOPEX, a building block is owned by a single container.
A building block is an element that can be directly owned by a container such as a library.For example, applications, org-units and processes are building blocks.
A container is a body-of-knowledge which is made of a set of building-blocks. The building-blocks of a container are asserted to exist for a given understanding of a business domain by a semantic community.For example, a company can be seen as a container.
Lastly, a building block or a container can be referenced by a container different from that to which it belongs. It is thus part of the scope of the container that references it.
Thus, with HOPEX, containers have two components:
• building blocks , which are reusable elements owned by a single container.
• import relationships, which broaden the scope of a container to other modeling building blocks.
An import relationship indicates that a building block or a set of building blocks for a target container is integrated in the scope of the container initiating the import. There are two import relationships: importing an entire container and importing building blocks on a unitary basis.
You can define a library hierarchy that describes different business contexts.