Shood : a Design Object Model

This paper is an overview of a three years effort aimed at providing a flexible and powerful model for design applications. The result is a data model called SHOOD based on object-oriented concepts and frame-based knowledge representation. SHOOD implements sophisticated features, such as : • object persistence, • multi-methods along a specific specialization hierarchy, which is independent of the class hierarchy, • sophisticated semantic relationships e.g, dependency relationships between objects, which are totally independent of the composition relationship, • multiple object representations, allowing the users to manipulate the objects from several points of views simultaneously, • the systematic use of a powerful meta-object kernel, which is used to implement a reflexive architecture. This paper is an informal overview of SHOOD. It focuses on the last two issues.