Toward resolving inadequacies in object-oriented data models

Abstract

The object oriented (OO) paradigm suffers from several inadequacies which are widely recognized, e.g. lack of a formal foundation, general disagreement in interpreting OO concepts, lack of a declarative query language, use of a navigational interface, inheritance conflicts in class hierarchies, etc. In the paper, a representative list of these inadequacies is presented. Some proposals that have been made to resolve some of these inadequacies are reviewed. Then the authors outline and justify an entity relationship based three level schema architecture which addresses several OO data modelling inadequacies, viz. the lack of support for the notion of relationship in the OO approach, the lack of support for external schemas, the inability to judge the quality of an OO schema and the lack of a reasonable approach to resolve inheritance conflicts in class hierarchies. © 1993.