Exploiting domain knowledge during the automated design of object-oriented databases

Abstract

Recent years have seen the development of a number of expert system type tools who's primary objective is to provide support to a human during the process of database analysis and design. It is generally accepted that these tools, although possessing database design knowledge, are in most cases ignorant of the application domains in which they work, and as such are required to ask what may be regarded as extremely trivial questions in order to elicit the required information. This paper illustrates how domain knowledge representing aspects of these applications may be represented within such tools using a thesaurus approach, and how this knowledge may be exploited by a tool during design processing. It discusses how the technique has been applied to a knowledge based tool designed to support the development of object-oriented databases, resulting in an increase in both the processing efficiency and the overall appearance of intelligence of the tool.