Engineering Database as a Medium for Translation

In this paper we describe the translation facilities as a component of EDM-2 database. We introduce a new approach to translation that is different from the traditional translators in databases and the standard neutral file approach. First, we define design views, which are different from database views in that they allow manipulation of data, and they represent the same object or information in different formats. Second, we define object structures that capture the different representations of objects and define the relationships among them. The two main relationships here are the specialization lattice and the composition lattice. Third, we describe the basic steps of the translation process and generalize the common ones. We provide facilities for developing translators that take advantage of this generalization. We present an example of the most common representations in engineering design (IGES and DXF) to illustrate the various steps and structures in our model.