Abstraction of Object-Oriented Data Models

ion of Object-Oriented Data Models Karl J. Lieberherr, Paul Bergstein, Ignacio Silva-Lepe Northeastern University, College of Computer Science Cullinane Hall, 360 Huntington Ave., Boston MA 02115 [email protected] phone: (617) 437 20 77 Abstract The contributions of this paper are two-fold: First we introduce a novel, axiomatically de ned object-oriented data model, called the Demeter kernel model, and second we outline several computational problems underlying the bottom-up design process in the kernel model. Speci cally, we sketch a fast algorithm, called SMCDL-A, for abstracting a single inheritance class hierarchy from object examples. SMCDL-A \invents" abstract classes to minimize the total size of the classes which generalize the object examples. SMCDL-A provides a formal solution to the bottom-up design problem which so far only has been addressed informally. SMCDL-A has applications to object-oriented design, conceptual scheme design for object-oriented databases and knowledge acquisition from examples.