ylfink@water.waterloo.edu (ylfink) (02/16/88)
DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE
UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO
SEMINAR ACTIVITIES
OFFICE AUTOMATION SEMINAR
- Thursday, February 18, 1988
Mr. Eric Ledoux, a graduate student of this department,
will speak on ``Support for Document Organization,
Placement, and Access in ODAS''.
TIME: 9:30 AM
ROOM: MC 6091A
ABSTRACT
We describe some aspects of the design and
implementation of ODAS, an Optical Disk based office
information Archival System. We address three specific
problems that we believe are important considerations
in the design of an office information storage kernel
which allows specialized data management applications
(DMA's) to exploit high-capacity WORM disk storage.
First, such a system should employ a simple, very
general data model which the private data models of
individual DMA's may map into. We define a ``logical
file model'' as a common data representation for ODAS
applications; ``logical files'' group together related
``documents'' (hierarchies of ``components'') of
possibly different type. Second, we define a standard
interface for integration of application-specific
access methods with the storage kernel. Integration
takes place at the kernel level rather than at the DMA
level to promote reusability of access method
implementations among unrelated applications. Third,
individual applications must be able to control the
physical clustering of data on and among optical disks
in order to achieve acceptable performance for
retrieval of large multimedia documents in a multiuser
environment. We define a high-level declarative
language, DSL, for specifying physical data placement
algorithms and access method selection.