PSE: An Object-Oriented Representation for Modeling and Managing Part-of Relationships

摘要

Part-of relationships are needed to model structures of composite objects. Especially, composite objects, known as physical assemblies, are very popular in several applications. The existing object-oriented representations of physical assemblies and query languages based on them have several disadvantages. For example, they suppose that the user knows the structure of a physical assembly completely. This is not a realistic requirement in those cases where a physical assembly consists of a huge number of parts. Likewise the user has in them to control traversals of physical assemblies, i.e. they have a low degree of declarativity. Further, they do not support intensional and combined extensional-intensional queries which would be necessary in an advanced manipulation of physical assemblies. We develop the PSE (Part-of Structure Element) representation for removing the above disadvantages. The PSE representation is a set theoretical and constructor-oriented representation for physical assemblies and it can be used in the implementation based on both the object-oriented and deductive object-oriented database (DOOD) paradigms.