Using the STEP standard and databases in science

Abstract

Database management systems (DBMS) have to provide certain facilities meeting the requirements of scientific and statistical database management. Reviewing problems and promises for current database technology, the STEP standard is assessed for selected aspects of data management, data access, data exchange, and data modeling. STEP-based solutions are proposed for concrete examples of SS-DBM especially in the context of the scientific data exchange standard FITS. The author introduces and discusses EXPRESS, the modeling language of STEP, and SDAI, the corresponding data access interface. The performance of navigational access provided by SDAI is considered a crucial aspect. Exploiting the code generation mechanism used to instantiate SDAI for a given programming language-he calls it a generated call interface-an adequate software architecture on top of an ODBMS as well as STEP-specific optimizations are proposed.