Introduction

 

ConceptBase is a deductive object base management system for meta databases. Its data model is a conceptual modeling language making it particularily well-suited for design and modeling applications. Its underlying data model allows to uniformly represent data, classes, meta classes, meta meta classes etc. yielding a powerful meta-CASE environment. The system has been used in projects ranging from development support for data-intensive applications [JMSV90, JJQV99, JQC*00], requirements engineering [RaDh92, Eber97, NJJ*96], electronic commerce [QSJ02], and version&configuration management [RJG*91] to co-authoring of technical documents [HJEK90].

The key features distinguishing ConceptBase from other extended DBMS and meta-modeling systems are:

• clean formal integration of deductive and object-oriented abstraction by Datalog logical theories
• client-server architecture with wide-area Internet access
• equivalent logical, semantic network, and text frame representations
• all extensional data (ordinary objects, their attributes, their specialization relationships, their instantiation relationships) is represented by a single data structure called P-facts

ConceptBase implements the version O-Telos (= Object-Telos) of the knowledge representation language Telos [MBJK90]. O-Telos integrates a thoroughly axiomatized structurally object-oriented kernel with a predicative assertion language in the style of deductive databases. A complete formal definition can be found in [JGJ*95, Jeus92]. O-Telos is viewed as a hybrid knowledge representation language integrating ideas from frame-like concept description languages and deductive databases. This hybrid character suggests a hypertext-style combination of (graphical) semantic network views and (textual) frame representations at the user interface. Both O-Telos views are based on the common logical representation so that they can be treated in a completely symmetrical way, both for purposes of querying/browsing and of editing/manipulation.

• Background and History
• ConceptBase Architecture
• Hardware and Software Requirements
• Overview of this Manual
• Differences to Earlier Versions