Object - Protocol Model Data Managament Tools ` 97

The development of the Object-Protocol Model (OPM) and OPM data management tools started in 1992. The main motivation for developing OPM at the time was the need to provide data management support for large scale DNA sequencing laboratories. We designed the protocol class as a construct for modeling sequencing, as well as other scientific, experiments. Since objectbased data models were well suited for modeling the complex data underlying the scientific and traditional database applications targeted by OPM, we decided to incorporate the protocol class construct into the framework of an object data model [2]. The development of the OPM data management tools can be split into three stages. Initially, the OPM data management tools aimed only at providing