Authors: Michael Schrefl, Stefan Conrad
Tags: 2001, conceptual modeling, Günter Preuner
Database schemas are often not de®ned by a single person but by several future users of the database who de®ne their possibly dierent views on the proposed database schema. These views are collected and integrated during the subsequent design step of view integration. In object-oriented databases, view integration must handle the integration of the structure and the behavior of objects. Whereas integration of object structure has been treated in the realm of semantic data models in the past, integration of object behavior has received little attention so far. Behavior is usually de®ned at two levels of detail: by activities, which correspond to methods in object-oriented languages, and by object life-cycles, which represent the overall behavior of objects during their life time. This paper presents an approach to integrate object life-cycles in object-oriented database schemas using a notation based on Petri nets. We will introduce dierent methods of integration depending on identi®ed semantic correspondences between the object types in the views.
