Markus Baumeister, RWTH Aachen
Abstract of "Compaction of large Class Hierarchies in
Engineering Databases"
Engineering knowledge is characterized by variant and alternative
designs for each problem. To alleviate reuse these variants
should be captured as classes in the schema. This results in a
class hierarchy bloated by many intersection classes, if 'standard'
object models are used.
This paper proposes a mechanism, called 'aspects', which uses
a restricted form of multiple instantiation to avoid intersection
classes. Unlike similar approaches such as 'roles' our work
allows various interdependencies between the different aspects of
a class to be modeled. We demonstrate these abilities on an example
taken from chemical process engineering.