An object-oriented approach to model management

Abstract

In order to apply the object-oriented programming paradigm to Model Management, a model must be interpreted as a collection of “objects” which perform the various model management functions by receiving and responding to “messages”. The recently proposed Structured Modeling framework is used to identify the classes of objects which constitute a model. The protocols, or sets of messages, which would be needed to carry out a variety of model manipulations, are also described. The close correspondence between the representation of a Structured Model in terms of objects and an earlier proposal for its representation as a relational database suggests the possibility of using a relational DBMS to implement an object-oriented Model Management Systems.