Multiple views with multiple behaviours for interoperable object-oriented database systems

Abstract

There is increasing interest from large organisations who are requiring access to and manipulation of data distributed over the multiple sites of a computer network, and furthermore, they want to share and reuse database resources and services that are not available in their original systems. In the context of Object-Oriented Database Systems (OODBSs), services are the set of methods that describe the behaviour of a particular class in a database system. Sharing these services saves effort, cost and time where the investment made in developing them can be exploited again by the original owner of these services and also by new users in the interoperation context. Different users have different needs for data integration, and the same user might want to integrate the same data with different services (i.e. behaviours). Therefore, multiple integration views with multiple behaviours are required to capture this diversity. This paper describes the theoretical framework we are using in the construction of the (MVMBS) Multiple Views supported by Multiple Behaviours System. MVMBS offers the potential for users to work in terms of integrated and customised global views supported by multiple behaviours. Our goals for MVMBS include flexibility and customisability, to this end we have developed a semantically-rich integration operator language. The user is able to generate global view(s) from scratch by means of these operators. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.