Assignment 4: Pets in the neighbourhood

Draw a schema for the creation of a registry of pets in your neigbourhood.

For each pet you need to record the species, gender, basic colour, size, owner, and a brief free text description.

You also need to keep some information about persons with regard to their relation to animals. In particular, whether a person owns animals and which ones; relations, such as “likes”, “admires”, “has been bitten by”, etc., between persons and specific animals; and relations that express general dispositions of persons towards animals species, such as “is afraid of snakes”, “loves dogs”, “is allergic to cats”, etc.

Finally, the species recorded should be connected with the zoological taxonomy.

You are invited to explore two alternative approaches: (1) model species as classes which animals belong to; (2) model species as attribute values assigned to animals. Give examples of cases in which you might prefer one approach to the other.