This page shows all publications that appeared in the IASI annual research reports. Authors currently affiliated with the Institute are always listed with the full name.

You can browse through them using either the links of the following line or those associated with author names.

Show all publications of the year  1998, with author Formica A., in the category IASI Research Reports (or show them all):

---

IASI Research Report n. 468  (Next)  

Beeri C., Anna Formica, Michele Missikoff

Inheritance hierarchy design in object-oriented databases

ABSTRACT

Object-oriented database schema design is still mostly an art. One of the difficulties encountered during design is typing conflicts induced by multiple inheritance. In this paper, we propose a method for treating such a kind of conflicts. Our approach to inheritance conflict solving consists of several ingredients. First, we rely on branding, to introduce 'type equivalence by name', thus allowing a designer to distinguish between structurally similar but semantically different types. However, we offer a heuristic that does not require a designer to explicitly state branding declarations. Second, we describe various kinds of conflicts, and we offer a set of procedures that analyze a schema to discover such conflicts, classify them, offering potential solutions, if possible. The procedures have been conceived for a design system that allows a designer maximum flexibility, while guiding him/her to a correct design.