ConceptBaseA deductive object manager
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ConceptBase is a multi-user deductive object manager mainly intended for conceptual modeling and coordination in design environments. The system implements O-Telos, a dialect of Telos which amalgamates properties of deductive and object-oriented languages. Key features are
All classes, meta classes, instances, attributes, rules, constraints, and queries are uniformly represented as objects. Any object may be updated at any time in the life cycle of the object base. Even class membership is regarded as an object and is subject to updates.
The semantics of O-Telos -- esp. class membership, attribution, and inheritance -- is firmly based on rock-solid DATALOG, a simple logic which provides an non-ambiguous way of defining which statements are regarded by the system to be true. Any query posed to the system will terminate and produce the correct answer.
The meta-modeling ability allows to represent heterogeneous modeling languages like entity-relationship diagrams, OMT, etc. as O-Telos meta classes whose rules and constraints encode the axioms of the respective language, e.g. generalization. The meta classes can co-exist within the same object base. Objects described in one modeling language can be explicitely linked to objects described in some other modeling language.
ConceptBase follows a client-server architecture. Client programs can connect to the ConceptBase server and exchange data via the interprocess communication of the Internet protocol. The ConceptBase programming interface allows the users to create their own client programs in pure Java, C or Prolog. The Java-based ConceptBase user interface offers a palette of graphical, tabular, and textual tools for editing and browsing the object base. It runs on any computer that provides a Java runtime enviroment. Embedding of the user interface into a Web page is possible as well.
ConceptBase is currently applied at more than 500 sites world-wide (see references) for research as well as teaching. Being freely distributed since 1990 it is the first and still one of the most widely used DOOD (deductive and object-oriented database) systems world-wide. See here for some information on typical applications of ConceptBase.
Lehrstuhl Prof. Dr. Matthias Jarke, c/o ConceptBase Team
RWTH Aachen, Ahornstr. 55, 52056 Aachen, Germany
Fax: +49-241-80 22321, Email: cb@i5.informatik.rwth-aachen.de