Environments for Viewpoint Representations

The Department of Information Science is one of six departments that make up the Division of Commerce at the University of Otago. The department offers courses of study leading to a major in Information Science within the BCom, BA and BSc degrees. In addition to undergraduate teaching, the department is also strongly involved in postgraduate research programmes leading to MCom, MA, MSc and PhD degrees. Research projects in software engineering and software development, information engineering and database, software metrics, knowledge-based systems, natural language processing, spatial information systems, and information systems security are particularly well supported. The views expressed in this paper are not necessarily the same as those held by members of the editorial board. The accuracy of the information presented in this paper is the sole responsibility of the authors. condition that the authors and the Series are given due acknowledgment. Reproduction in any form for purposes other than research or teaching is forbidden unless prior written permission has been obtained from the authors. Correspondence This paper represents work to date and may not necessarily form the basis for the authors' final conclusions relating to this topic. It is likely, however, that the paper will appear in some form in a journal or in conference proceedings in the near future. The authors would be pleased to receive correspondence in connection with any of the issues raised in this paper, or for subsequent publication details. Please write directly to the authors at the address provided below. (Details of final journal/conference publication venues for these papers are also provided on the Department's publications web pages: Abstract Modelling the structure of data is an important part of any system analysis project. One problem that can arise is that there may be many differing viewpoints among the various groups that are involved in a project. Each of these viewpoints describes a perspective on the phenomenon being modelled. In this paper, we focus on the representation of developer viewpoints, and in particular on how multiple viewpoint representations may be used for database design. We examine the issues that arise when transforming between different viewpoint representations, and describe an architecture for implementing a database design environment based on these concepts.