Identifying Objects by Declarative Queries
M. Gogolla · The MIT Press eBooks · 2000
Object identification in data models, especially in semantic, EntityRelationship, and Object-Oriented data models is studied. Various known approaches to object identification are shown, and an alternative proposal to the topic is put forward. The main new idea is to attach to each object type an arbitrary query, a so-called observation term, in order to observe a unique, identifying property of objects of the corresponding type. 1.1 Introduction Conceptual modeling of information systems means to fix the static and dynamic characteristics of the system to be developed before going into implementation details. One of the main tasks in conceptual modeling is to identify the type of objects to be handled with the system under development: The objects [ABD + 90] are of central interest. Our approach concentrates on the question how to refer to single objects and identify them in a global system context. One very often used approach for object identification is to refer to objects by a ...