Knowledge Management in Interoperable Databases

摘要

Interoperable Information Systems require open communication systems, open software architecture but also open database systems to support the multi-user, multi-system environment with a reliable secondary data store that can easily be distributed over a network. By encapsulating complex data structures and their associated operations within object types the new generation of object oriented database systems will support more and more non standard applications efficiently. For modelling the semantics of attributes, relationships, and object types in a modular and declarative way more powerful concepts are required. The use of metatypes for declaring the transitivity, inheritance behavior, constraints, etc., of relationship, the generic functionality of object types and for dealing with multiple inheritance is proposed. Thereby data models become open to describe preexisting arbitrary database systems homogeneously and to include new specialized types of semantic relationships and object classes for new applications. (Copyright (c) Gesellschaft fur Mathematik und Datenverarbeitung mbH.)