Modeling Business Applications with the OODB Ownership Relationship

Ownership is a very important relationship in the business world. It is endowed with rich semantics and various complexities with respect to both the owner and the property that is owned. In this paper, we present a formal model of \ownership" relationships in the context of an Object-Oriented Database (OODB) system. As our motivation, we employ three scenarios involving various ownership relationships that exhibit a wide range of distinctions. Essential aspects of ownership relationships are their related transactions such as sale, lease, and donation. Since certain of these can be applied with respect to speciic kinds of ownership, while others cannot, we need to explicitly model this behavior in order to properly represent ownership in an OODB system. The ownership relationship, at times, exhibits inheritance behavior, where the values of certain attributes are derived with respect to it. With these issues in mind, we have identiied and formally deened various characteristics (which we call the dimensions) of ownership. Our ownership model incorporates all these to capture the functionality of ownership's transactions and inheritance.