adriana@dnlunx.UUCP (Florescu A.) (10/12/88)
Hello everyone!
I am investigating the possibilities of semantical and object-oriented
databases. After reading some introductory articles about them, it is still
not clear to me what the difference is between these two types of
databases and what is the state of art in this area. I have read about VBASE,
but I would like to know more about other commercially available databases of
this kind and their possibilities to support really large amounts of data.
I am also interested in statistical methods in inductive reasoning. I have
been trying to find some literature about this subject, but the most recent
article I could find had been published in 1984!!! That's quite old, isn't it.
I would be very grateful to everyone sending me some tips about books,
articles and existing tools or any remarks about these subjects. Any
information that can help me is welcome.
My address is : !mcvax!dnlunx!adriana
Thanks!
Adrianaras@hpclras.HP.COM (Ron Rasmussen) (10/26/88)
Hi,
I ran across an article with the words 'Semantic' and 'object-oriented'
in it. The article was about the "Cactis" database done at the University
of Colorado at Boulder. In fact, Cactis stands for the Colorado Active
Semantics Database and it claims to be a hybrid of semantic and object-
oriented. The papers I have on it are the following:
CACTIS: A Database System for Specifying Functionally-Defined Data
Authors: Roger King and Scott Hudson
Published: IEEE 1986
Object-Oriented Database SUpport for Software Environments
Authors: Roger King and Scott Hudson
Published: ACM 1987
The CACTIS Project: Database Support for Software Environments
Authors: Roger King and Scott Hudson
Published: IEEE 1988 Transactions on Software Engineering
I believe Scott Hudson worked on a 'purely' semantic database before
working with King on CACTIS.
I am very interested in anything you find out.
Sincerely,
Ron Rasmussen
----------------------------------------------------------
Ron Rasmussen -- HP California Language Lab (ITG/ISD/CLL)
uucp: {hplabs,hpfcla,hpfclp} !hpda!ras
-----------------------------------------------------------schunk@infhil.UUCP (Michael Schunk) (11/03/88)
You may find some literature in the acm computing surveys: 2/87 Atkinson/ Buneman 3/87 Hull/ King 3/88 Peckham/ Maryanski Springers Lecture Notes in Computing Science, Volume 334, contains papers from the second international workshop on obj. oriented database systems. Now my own question: I have the task to make arbitrary data objects of the two languages Ada and Setl ( as the name implies a set oriented language, that uses sets, tuples and maps as type constructors ) persistent. Programs in one of the languages should be able to access persistent objects created from a program in the other language. My idea was to use a semantic/obj. oriented database and to create interfaces for each of the languages: persistent objects are stored in the database and can be accessed with the interface. My problem is to get a semantic database. We only have a normal relational database and it seems to be a lot of work to store arbitrary objects with it. Does anybody know from where to get a prototype of a semantic or object oriented database system? Advanced properties such as inheritance, generalization etc are nice but not necessary, because we do not plan to make an object oriented language persistent at the moment. Thanks in advance, Michael Schunk