Data Integration in Engineering Environments.
Martin Schönhoff, Markus Strässler, Klaus R. Dittrich · 1997
The life cycle of a complex engineering product is nowadays supported by a set of CAx tools, each depending on its own data management system. The project IDEE 1 aims at the integration of heterogeneous local engineering applications into a tightly coupled database federation. In this paper, we initially present IDEE's general and schema architectures and explain what different kinds of local applications we are dealing with. The main part then covers issues of the federation's global data model and how it is influenced by our application domain: We first discuss the choice of the object-oriented database standard ODMG--93 as our global data model. Then we show how different levels of global object identity lead to usability specifications of objects which represent data from rather different local systems. Finally, our analysis of the requirements and possibilities of global version management suggests a versioning approach also based on usability specifications. Keywords: federate...