Corporate Architecture and Object Oriented Modeling Substrate for Distributed Heterogeneous Information Systems

摘要

Distributed information processing systems pose major challenges for the future of large scale software systems. Contemporary solutions to the problem of heterogeneous distributed database management are inadequate with respect to the requirements posed by modern software environments. The thesis refers to the features and functionalities of a general purpose distributed heterogeneous database architecture, capable of supporting a wide spectrum of software applications (AI, Expert Systems, Software Engineering Environments, etc). An object oriented modeling facility is used as the vehicle for improving interconnectivity among a number of heterogeneous data repositories. Moreover, it investigates the capability of the object oriented approach to express the structures supported by traditional databases (relational, functional, hierarchical). Accordingly, it elaborates on the specification of a common substrate for expressing the differences and similarities between existing data representations (models), exposing thus their semantics to the object-oriented system. Furthermore, it refers to global transformation mechanisms leading to a consistent mapping between heterogeneous query language constructs. The structure of a global query language is discussed with respect to the functionality that it should provide and the structural background offered by the global model.