Applications of Object Database Technology in Thermodynamics and Materials Science

Over the last few decades there has been a continual development of computer programs and databases directed at storage and manipulation of scientiic data. The data these programs manipulate are typically kept in a proprietary format with little thought given to portability, upgrading or interfacing with other software. Hence, there is an inability to share data across programs or between data sources. We believe that many of the dii-culties with sharing scientiic data and building on previous computational eeorts result from the incompatibility of programs and data in the scientiic domain. We are involved in exploring an alternative data management technology, namely object-oriented databases (OODB) to develop solutions to these questions. This paper outlines the diiculties in the current representation of scientiic data and discusses some features of OODBs that help overcome these diiculties. Then, a data model is presented that eeectively models both the crystallographic and thermodynamic domains allowing easily extensible and maintainable data and programs.