Accommodating changes in semistructured databases using multidimensional OEM

Abstract

Multidimensional Semistructured Data (MSSD) are semistructured data that present different facets under different contexts (sets of worlds). The notion of context has been incorporated in OEM, and the extended model is called Multidimensional OEM (MOEM), a graph model for MSSD. In this paper, we explain in detail how MOEM can represent the history of OEM databases. We discuss how MOEM properties are applied in the case of representing OEM histories, and show that temporal OEM snapshots can be obtained from MOEM. We present a system that implements the proposed ideas, and we use an example scenario to demonstrate how an underlying MOEM database accommodates changes in an OEM database. Furthermore, we show that MOEM is capable to model changes occurring not only in OEM databases, but in Multidimensional OEM databases as well. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2002.