Incorporating semantic relationships into an object-oriented database system

Semantic relationships between classes play an important role when building information systems. This is true in traditional data modeling, knowledge representation, and object-oriented modeling. An example of such a semantic relationship is the part-whole relationship. Most object-oriented modeling approaches include such constructs. However, commercial object-oriented database (OODB) systems ordinarily do not provide built-in support for them. We present a methodology by which a semantic relationship can be incorporated into an existing OODB system. We give an overview of the general methodology and show the addition of a part-whole semantic relationship to the ONTOS OODB system. An example application demonstrating our implementation is available on the Web.