property

A property is a general state that defines a general object collection of interest in a higher context (e.g. everything that costs money or persons that have been in a movie at a certain time, but also the names a person has got). Potentially, properties define object collections or classified collections, even though in many cases those collection consist of exactly one element (e.g. person's birth date).

Properties are not values, but define the concept for a value to be associated with an object instance. Properties might be considered as placeholders for values in an object instance.

Properties are members of a complex data type that describe the details of the data type. A property may store atomic values, but also complex data type instances or instance collections. Property instances are always owned by its object instance and are deleted, when the object instance is deleted. Usually, property instances do not have an identity, but complex properties as references or relationships do have a property identity as well, which is a local object identity (LOID).

A property includes a structural definition of the property (member) and definition of causal context. Thus, properties are acting units, i.e. properties may react on internal or user-defined events.