A methodology for design and documentation of persistent object bases of information systems

Abstract

An object model and a methodology for designing a persistent object base with it are presented. The modeling constructs of the object model are object classes, class relationships, functions that relate objects (instances of classes), operations on classes and objects, and the dependency of operations. The methodology is iterative and assumes the existence of a set of predefined object classes. An information system is designed as having two object classes: user interface and persistent object base. Before the design process starts, all the operations on the user interface objects must have been defined. The goal of the design is to iteratively refine the persistent object base into a set of object classes so that it can support the operations defined in the user interface and be implemented using the predefined classes. >