Identifying a forest hierarchy in an OODB specialization hierarchysatisfying disciplined modeling

摘要

The work is motivated by the desire to develop methods tocomprehend large vocabularies and large schemas of object-orienteddatabases. The ability of a user of a database participating in afederated system to retrieve information from the other database systemswill be greatly enhanced by acquiring a better comprehension of thesesystems. The authors are trying to develop both a theoretical paradigmand a methodology to analyze existing large schemas. Their approach toachieve comprehension is based on combining two concepts: informationalthinning (i.e. concentration on the specialization hierarchy of theschema) and partitioning. They present a new technique for modelingwhich is called disciplined modeling. Based on the rules of disciplinedmodeling we develop a theoretical paradigm to support the existence of ameaningful forest hierarchy within the specialization hierarchy. Such ahierarchy functions as a skeleton of the schema and supportscomprehension and partitioning efforts