View Integration of Behavior in Object-Oriented Databases

Database schemas are often not defined by a single person but by several future users of the database who define their possibly different views on the proposed database schema. These views are collected and integrated during the subsequent design step of view integration. In object-oriented databases, view integration must handle the integration of the structure and the behavior of objects. Whereas integration of object structure has been treated in the realm of semantic data models in the past, integration of object behavior has received little attention so far. Behavior is usually defined at two levels of detail: by activities, which correspond to methods in object-oriented languages, and by object life-cycles, which represent the overall behavior of objects during their life time.

This paper presents an approach to integrate object life-cycles in object-oriented database schemas using a notation based on Petri nets. We will introduce different methods of integration depending on identified semantic correspondences between the object types in the views.