An Object-Centered Data Model for Engineering Design Databases

Entities in engineering design databases need to evolve in both structure and behavior. Such a need is not well addressed by object-oriented data models based on the class concept. On the contrary, models that are based on the prototype concept allow dynamic object evolution but they do not have the abilities for object classification and strong typing supported by models that have classes. In this paper we formally define an objectoriented model which properly consolidates those two modeling approaches and can provide dynamic object evolution, flexible object classification, and strong typing.