Polymorphic reuse mechanisms for object-oriented database specifications

A polymorphic approach to the incremental design and reuse of object-oriented methods and query specifications is presented. Using this approach, the effort required for manually reprogramming methods and queries due to schema modifications can be avoided or minimized. The salient features of of our approach are the use of propagation patterns and a mechanism for propagation pattern refinement. Propagation patterns can be employed as an interesting specification formalism for modeling operational requirements in object-oriented database systems. They encourage the reuse of operational specifications against the structural modification of an object-oriented schema. Propagation pattern refinement is suited for the specification of reusable operational modules, and for achieving reusability of propagation patterns towards the operational requirement changes.<>