Authors: Dimitri Theodoratos
Tags: 1996, conceptual modeling
Current Object Oriented (OO) Database schema structures allow isa relationships and multiple inheritance. We extend these structures with features from semantic modelling that are not traditionally supported by OO schemas: disjointness of classes and class intersection inclusion into other classes as well as negations of these statements. Formally we represent schemas as sets of first order monadic formulas. We provide a formal system for schemas that is sound and complete both for finite and unrestricted implications. Based on it and on well known algorithms we show that checking formula deduction is polynomial. Consistency is characterized completely in two alternative ways in terms of formula deduction. We show that these results allow us to deal efficiently with the issues of incremental/intelligent consistency checking, redundancy removal, minimal representation and updating in OO schemas.Read the full paper here: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/BFb0019915
