Unifying and Generalizing Relations in Role-Based Data Modeling and Navigation

Object-oriented programming languages support concise navigation of relations represented by references. However, relations are not first-class citizens and bidirectional navigation is not supported. The relational paradigm provides first-class relations, but with bidirectional navigation through verbose queries. We present a systematic analysis of approaches to modeling and navigating relations. By unifying and generalizing the features of these approaches, we developed the design of a data modeling language that features first-class relations, n-ary relations, native multiplicities, bidirectional relations and concise navigation. The language static and dynamic semantics are formally specified and the language is implemented in the Spoofax language workbench. Evaluation of this implementation shows the language is concise and has good usability but lacks expressiveness.

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