Extending Object Oriented Databases to Support the Viewpoint Mechanism

An important dimension in the database technology evolution is the development of advanced/sophisticated database models. In particular, the viewpoint concept receives a widespread attention. Its integration to a data model gives a flexibility for the conventional object-oriented data model and allows one to improve the modeling power of objects. On the other hand, the viewpoint concept can be used as a means to master the complexity of the current systems permitting a distributed manner to develop them. In this paper we propose a data model MVDB (Multi-Viewpoint DataBase model) that extends the object database model with the viewpoint mechanism. The viewpoint notion is used as an approach for a distributed development of a database schema, as a means for object multiple description and as a mechanism for dealing with the integrity constraint problems commonly met in distributed environment.