Authors: Lissa F. Pollacia, Lois M.L. Delcambre
Tags: 1993, conceptual modeling
This research complements active object-oriented database management systems by providing a formal, yet conceptually-natural model for complex object construction and destruction. The Object Flow Model (OFM), introduced in this paper, assumes an object-oriented database for the rich structural description of objects and for the specification of methods to manipulate objects. The OFM contributes a third component, the Object Flow Diagram (OFD), which provides a visual formalism to describe how multiple objects and events can actively invoke processing steps, how objects can become part of progressively more complex objects, and how complex objects can be picked apart. The OFD thus provides an invocation mechanism that is more general than a single message and a processing mechanism that may invoke multiple methods (so long as they apply to either the input or output objects). The development of the OFD was influenced by conceptual modeling languages and discrete event simulation languages and the formal semantics of the OFD is based on work in deductive databases.Read the full paper here: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/BFb0024352
