Materialization and Its Metaclass Implementation

Materialization is a powerful and ubiquitous abstraction pattern for conceptual modeling that relates a class of categories (e.g., models of cars) and a class of more concrete objects (e.g., individual cars). This paper presents materialization as a generic ship between two classes of objects and describes an abstract implementation of it. The presentation is abstract in that it is not targeted at a specific object system. The target system is supposed to provide: 1) basic object-modeling facilities, supplemented with an explicit metaclass concept and 2) operations for dynamic schema evolution like creation or deletion of a subclass of a given class and modification of the type of an attribute of a class. The presentation is generic in that the semantics of materialization is implemented in a metaclass, which is a template to be instantiated in applications. Application classes are created as instances of the metaclass and they are thereby endowed with structure and behavior consistent...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2002
• Where: TKDE
• Authors: Mohamed Dahchour, Alain Pirotte, Esteban Zimányi
• Keywords: Basic Object-modeling Facilities, Dynamic Schema Evolution, TKDE 2002, Ubiquitous Abstraction Pattern