Developing and accessing scientific databases with the Object-Protocol Model (OPM) data management tools

Abstract

The Object-Protocol Model (OPM) data management tools provide facilities for rapid development, documentation, and flexible exploration of scientific databases. The tools are based on OPM, an object oriented data model which is similar to the ODMG standard, but also supports extensions for modeling scientific data (L.A. Chen and V.M. Markowitz, 1995). Databases designed using OPM can be implemented using a variety of commercial relational DBMSs, using schema translation tools that generate complete DBMS database definitions from OPM schemas (L.A. Chen and V.M. Markowitz, 1996). Further OPM schemas can be retrofitted on top of existing databases defined using a variety of notations, such as the relational data model or the ASN.1 data exchange format, using OPM retrofitting tools (L.A. Chen et al., 1997).