In 1874, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s (1827-1875) Les Quatre Parties du monde soutenant la sphère céleste (The Four Parts of the World Supporting Celestial Sphere), also referred to as Fontaine des quatre-parties-du-monde (Fountain World), was installed at southern end Luxembourg Gardens in Paris (Figure 1). By interrogating Fontaine’s site and iconography vis-à-vis Second French Empire, this paper...

— The design of a data base schema can be organized through a set of refînement steps, that gradually introducé progressive details in the description of reality. In this approach, suitable restrictions to refînement rules allow to guarantee both conceptual and logical properties. Following this approach the formalism of hypergraphs and hypergraph grammars can be applied to investigate various ...