Lehrgebiet Informationssysteme

FB Informatik

LG IS

AG DBIS

(C) AG DBIS

Enriching Object-Relational Databases with Relationship Semantics

Nan Zhang, Theo Härder, Joachim Thomas

University of Kaiserslautern
P.O. Box 3049, 67653 Kaiserslautern, Germany
e-mail: haerder@informatik.uni-kl.de

Full paper (postscript version compressed by gzip)

Abstract:

Data relationships play a very important role in application domains and thus should be a key issue in database modeling. However, they are still not well considered in the emerging object-relational database (ORDB) technology, where the main concern is put on the extension of the relational data model (RDM) with objects as basic modeling constructs. This paper addresses exploiting and supporting data relationships in ORDBs. The semantics of various data relationships are investigated with the help of an application example from manufacturing industry. The purpose of this work is to integrate relationship semantics into object-relational data models (ORDMs), that is, to provide a general mechanism which facilitates the explicit specification of relationship semantics. As a result, as much semantics of data relationships as possible can be captured, database management systems (DBMSs) will manipulate data in a consistent way, and users are to a large extent freed from having to take care of implementation details.

Published in Proc. 3rd Int. Workshop on Next Generation Information Technologies and Systems (NGITS'97), Israel, 1997, pp. 215-222.