Have an interesting situation. I have a table of entities that relate to one another in several different ways. One entity may be the parent of another and a child of another. One entity may be related to several different entities.

I resolved this by creating a role table which defines the role in a particular relationship. Another table, a join table, contains key values from the two related entities and a key to the role table.

Unlike most data relationships where the relational role is implicit in the structure of the application, I have to get explicit. Due to confidentiality, I can't get into further details, but I was wondering:

How would this sort of situation be defined in an OOAD Analysis Model? I sort of went directly to the Implementation Model without abstract definition.