Model for Design

The paper presents a Construction Database Model (CDM) used for the conceptual level modelling of design objects. A primary intention of the CDM model is modelling hierarchically structured objects and construction dependencies among objects. CDM is an attribute based data model. The CDM model represents various abstractions identiied in the semantic database models GSM, IFO, SAM* and FDM by means of attributes. To distinguish between diierent abstractions, the notion of attribute role is introduced. Special attention is paid to the representation of derived properties of the object. They are described by means of a constructor, that can be compared to derived attributes as deened in 10, 4, 22, 8]. The con-structor enables the description and reevaluation of the design object construction process. The CDM is used as a data model for the storage system Cons-Base, designed for storing data in CAD applications.