specialization is totally disjointed. I know that every association a1 involving s1 and c2 must be unique for each year, i.e. there cannot be two instances of s1 associated with c2 with the same year. as regards s2, however, there can be multiple instances of s2 that can be associated with c2 in the same year. Is this representation okay? I have two ideas
Every link between an instance of c1
(or a subclass of c1
) and an instance of c2
is represented by exactly one instance of a1
.
You wrote: "I know that every association a1 involving s1 and c2 must be unique for each year".
This is only correct if year
must be a unique attribute of a1
, but there is no reason why you could not have multiple instances of a1
with the same value of attribute year
.
You wrote: "there can be multiple instances of s2 that can be associated with c2 in the same year."
Your diagram allows this. If you want to indicate that all links between instances of s1
and instances of c2
have a unique value of year
, you could add a UML note to the diagram stating just that.