Computing access relevance for path-method generation in OODB and IM-OODB

A path-method (PM) is a mechanism to retrieve or to update information relevant to one class, in an object-oriented database (OODB), that is not stored with that class but with some other class. The PM traverses a chain of classes and connections that ends at the class where the required information is stored. However, it is a difficult task for a user to write PMs. This is because it might require comprehensive knowledge of many classes of the conceptual schema. But a typical user has often incomplete or even inconsistent knowledge of the schema. Currently we are developing a system, called Path-Method Generator (PMG), which generates PMs automatically according to a naive user's requests. One algorithm of PMG uses numerical access relevance between pairs of classes as a guide for the traversal of an OODB schema. In this paper we define the notion of access relevance to measure the significance of the (indirect) connection between any two classes in an OODB and present efficient algorithms to compute access relevance. The manual PM generation in an interoperable multi object-oriented database (IM-OODB) is even more difficult than for one OODB since a user has to be familiar with several OODBs. We use a hierarchical approach for developing efficient online algorithms for the computation of access relevances in an IM-OODB, based on precomputed access relevances for each autonomous OODB. In an IM-OODB the access relevances are used as a guide in generating PMs between the classes of different OODBs.