A framework to support an object-oriented view of existing engineering databases

This paper presents a framework for an Object Management System (OMS) to support an object-oriented view of an existing engineering database. OMS is intended to run on a workstation to access the engineering database on another machine (host). OMS has three components: a Data Model (DM) to define the objects and the relationships among the objects that exist in the host database, a Transformation Model (TM) to define the modeling concepts that are not directly supported in the DM, and a Mapping Facility/Optimizer (MF/O) to map the relationships to data stored in the host, and to build a host-executable program for each query the user issues. Mapping is done by host-executable procedures that encode the knowledge about the access to host-resident data. MF/O optimizes access to the host's database.