[bt-spec] BTP Issue 63 : Clarify the terminology around actors,roles and relationships

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BTP Issue 63 : Clarify the terminology around actors, roles and relationships

Category: editorial
Submitter: Sazi Temel, BEA Systems
Description:
Throughout the spec, actors and roles are many times used interchangeably, and even sometimes the relationship is used instead of name of a role.  Is Coordinator a role or a actor? Is superior-inferior an actor or a relationship? These all depends on what the definition of these terms are and we should clarify it very well.

These were source of some discussions in the past and looks like we can eliminate similar discussions in the future by clear definitions.

Here is an attempt to define actors, roles and relationships.

Actors and roles are an important part of any system modeling interacting entities in multiple contexts. An actor is an entity in a system, a doer with properties and capabilities. An actor has properties and services that are relevant across all the contexts in the system. A role is an actor within a context (relationship) An actor can 'play' multiple roles in a system, but only one in a given context. A role is played by only one actor and without the actor it is not valid.

For example while a BTP Coordinator is an actor that may play the role of Cohesion Composer, Atom Coordinator or a Sub-coordinator depending on the context in which it is referred, a superior or an inferior is not a role (but a relationship) since many actors in the system takes these roles, in fact all the actors in BTP are either superior or inferior.

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