OdeView: the graphical interface to Ode

Integration of object-oriented programming languages and database systems in KOPERNIK

Object-oriented databases (OODBs) have been used for many advanced applications requiring advanced modeling power. In this paper, a locking-based concurrency control scheme is presented for OODBs. The proposed scheme reduces locking overhead for class hierarchy which is an important property in OODBs. While existing schemes show good performance only for specific applications, the proposed scheme can incur less locking overhead for any applications. For the performance evaluation of the proposed scheme, simulation is conducted using 007 benchmark. Through the simulation, the proposed scheme is compared with the two existing techniques. The performance studies show that the proposed scheme is superior to existing works.

Object-oriented database systems (OODBs) need efficient support for manipulation of complex objects. In particular, support of queries involving evaluations of set predicates is often required in handling complex objects. In this paper, we propose a scheme to apply signature file techniques, which were originally invented for text retrieval, to the support of set value accesses, and quantitatively evaluate their potential capabilities. Two signature file organizations, the sequential signature file and the bit-sliced signature file, are considered and their performance is compared with that of the nested index for queries involving the set inclusion operator (⊆). We develop a detailed cost model and present analytical results clarifying their retrieval, storage, and update costs. Our analysis shows that the bit-sliced signature file is a very promising set access facility in OODBs.

apART reflects the structure of an open, distributed environment. According to the general trend in the area of imaging, network-capable, general purpose workstations with capabilities of open system image communication and image input are used. Several heterogeneous components like CCD cameras, slide scanners, and image archives can be accessed. The system is driven by an object-oriented user interface where devices (image sources and destinations), operators (derived from a commercial image processing library), and images (of different data types) are managed and presented uniformly to the user. Browsing mechanisms are used to traverse devices, operators, and images. An audit trail mechanism is offered to record interactive operations on low-resolution image derivatives. These operations are processed off-line on the original image. Thus, the processing of extremely high-resolution raster images is possible, and the performance of resolution dependent operations is enhanced significantly during interaction. An object-oriented database system (APRIL), which can be browsed, is integrated into the system. Attribute retrieval is supported by the user interface. Other essential features of the system include: implementation on top of the X Window System (X11R4) and the OSF/Motif widget set; a SUN4 general purpose workstation, inclusive ethernet, magneto optical disc, etc., as the hardware platform for the user interface; complete graphical-interactive parametrization of all operators; support of different image interchange formats (GIF, TIFF, IIF, etc.); consideration of current IPI standard activities within ISO/IEC for further refinement and extensions.

OODBMSs need more than declarative query languages and programming languages as their interfaces since they are designed and implemented for complex applications requiring more advanced and easy to use visual interfaces. We have developed a complete programming environment for this purpose, called MoodView. MoodView translates all the user actions performed through its graphical interface to SQL statements and therefore it can be ported onto any object-oriented database systems using SQL. MoodView provides the database programmer with tools and functionalities for every phase of object oriented database application development. Current version of MoodView allows a database user to design, browse, and modify database schema interactively and to display class inheritance hierarchy as a directed acyclic graph. MoodView can automatically generate graphical displays for complex and multimedia database objects which can be updated through the object browser. Furthermore, a database administration tool, a full screen text-editor, a SQL based query manager, and a graphical indexing tool for the spatial data, i.e., R Trees are also implemented.

This paper describes the general properties of complex objects in engineering designs. There are two types of complex objects: (i) the complex structural objects which describe the physical composition of the design, and (ii) the complex functional objects which describe the behavior of the design and its components. Data manipulation operations on complex structural objects are governed by a set of structural invariants. Similarly, the validation of functional abstraction is governed by a set of functional invariants. The structure-function interactions are represented by interaction objects that describe a set of mappings. These three object types constitute the Structure-Function paradigm. The S-F paradigm can be used to represent engineering designs and active environments, monitor manufacturing operations and industrial processes, and carry out simulations.

In this paper, formal relationships between classes of objects based on semantic data models (i.e. conceptual classes) and classes of objects based on object models (i.e system classes), are established. The proposed method starts from conceptual classes and generates system classes. This method can be employed to implement semantic data models on top of currently available object oriented database systems. As a consequence, the database applications can be specified with the flexibility of a conceptual schema while the obtained implementation exploits the efficiency of an object-oriented database system. Both the correctness and the completeness of our method are demonstrated and a discussion on its complexity is provided.

Object-oriented case representations require approaches for similarity assessment that allow to compare two differently structured objects, in particular, objects belonging to different object classes. Currently, such similarity measures are developed more or less in an ad-hoc fashion. It is mostly unclear, how the structure of an object-oriented case model, e.g., the class hierarchy, influences similarity assessment. Intuitively, it is obvious that the class hierarchy contains knowledge about the similarity of the objects. However, how this knowledge relates to the knowledge that could be represented in similarity measures is not obvious at all. This paper analyzes several situations in which class hierarchies are used in different ways for case modeling and proposes a systematic way of specifying similarity measures for comparing arbitrary objects from the hierarchy. The proposed similarity measures have a clear semantics and are computationally inexpensive to compute at run-time.

Dissociating stimulus information from internal representation—a case study in object recognition

S.70-79

Because of the increasing use of object-oriented database systems, special benchmarks have been developed to analyze performance. The benchmarks show unanimously that object-oriented systems are well-suited for applications that manage complex structures. Particularly, object-oriented database systems provide higher performance than relational ones. This is proven by synthetic schemas and elementary operations such as inserts and traversals, which are supposed to be characteristic for a lot of object-oriented applications. This experience report presents the results of a real application-specific investigation, comparing three commercial object-oriented database systems. The tests we performed took the elapsed times of an application “as a whole.” In spite of having characteristics similar to standard benchmarks, we obtained huge performance differences. To put it in a nutshell, standard benchmarks are not always meaningful and should not cause one to jump to conclusions. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

This chapter describes a hierarchical object-based data model for geographic information abstraction, sometimes referred to as conceptual generalization. The model is based on the definition of database object classes used to represent terrain features. A hierarchy of superclasses and composite object classes is derived from the basic object classification. Based on this hierarchy a set of abstraction rules is created. In addition to the hierarchy of classes and their mutual relationships two other types of descriptions of the data set are distinguished: the basic geometric level, and a topological description. Selection rules are related to the three descriptions by having, successively: thematic, topologic, and geometric conditions. The class description is used as an interface to control the abstraction process. The end-user is expected to define the subject of the abstraction in terms of a selection of classes, and, after doing so the model will allow ‘on the fly’ information abstraction.

This paper compares two approaches to meeting the data handling requirements of Intermedia, a hypermedia system developed at the Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship at Brown University. Intermedia, though written using an object-oriented programming language, relies on a traditional relational database management system for data storage and retrieval. We examine the ramifications of replacing the relational database with an object-oriented database. We begin by describing the important characteristics each database system. We then describe Intermedia and give an overview of its architecture and its data handling requirements. We explain why and how we used a relational database management system and the problems that we encountered with this system. We then present the design of an object-oriented database schema for Intermedia and compare the relational and object-oriented database management system approaches.

Region adjacency and its application to object detection

Heterogeneous object co-clustering has become an important research topic in data mining. In early years of this research, people mainly worked on two types of heterogeneous data (denoted by pair-wise co-clustering); while recently more and more attention was paid to multiple types of heterogeneous data (denoted by high- order co-clustering). In this paper, we studied the high- order co-clustering of objects with star-structured interrelationship, i.e., there is a central type of objects that connects the other types of objects. Actually, this case could be a very good model for many real-world applications, such as the co-clustering of Web images, their low-level visual features, and the surrounding text. We used a tripartite graph to represent the interrelationships among different objects, and proposed a consistent information theory which generates an effective algorithm to obtain the co-clusters of different types of objects. Experiments on a Web image show that our proposed algorithm is a better choice compared with previous work on heterogeneous object co-clustering.