Explicit modeling of the semantics of large multi-layered object-oriented databases

Abstract

Description-driven systems based on meta-objects are an increasingly popular way to handle complexity in large-scale object- oriented database applications. Such systems facilitate the management of large amounts of data and provide a means to avoid database schema evolution in many settings. Unfortunately, the description-driven approach leads to a loss of simplicity of the schema, and additional software behaviour is required for the management of dependencies, description relationships, and other Design Patterns that recur across the schema. This leads to redundant implementations of software that cannot be handled by using a framework-based approach. This paper presents an approach to address this problem which is based on the concept of an ontology of Design Patterns. Such an ontology allows the convenient separation of the structure and the semantics of database schemata. Through that, reusable software can be produced which separates application behaviour from the database schema.