Towards a unified view of design data and knowledge representation

Abstract

Adequate information modeling in non-standard application areas (e.g. engineering applications such as CAD/CAM, VLSI design or knowledgebased applications) requires the abstraction concepts of classification, aggregation, generalization, and association. The Molecule-Atom Data model (MAD) designed for the effective support of such an information model is justified and described with its essential properties and features. MAD offers dynamic object definition and object handling, based on direct and symmetric management of network structures and recursiveness. These generic mechanisms can be used to map the above mentioned abstraction concepts in a straight-forward manner. Thus, the mapping of a wide variety of semantic and object-oriented modeling constructs, including complex objects with shared subobjects, becomes feasible. All these concepts are illustrated by means of some vivid examples taken from the areas of CAD/CAM and knowledge-based applications.