A recursive approach to office object modelling

摘要

Office modelling aims at providing abstract, conceptual tools for describing office semantics in order to ease high-level and are more likely to correct application programming. Advanced office systems are complex organizations of objects, procedures, activities, locations, etc., incorporating independent user workstations with which people cooperate in executing complicated office tasks.Office information systems support the representation, storage, access and maintenance of complex data objects occurring frequently in office environments. Based on the structural aspects of such office objects, we provide language constructs to model office procedures which are perceived as being based on the following semantic primitives: complex data object constructors that accept object components (e.g., addresses, dates, text-fragments) and return office objects of composite type (e.g., letters, forms, memos), component selectors that select specific object components from composite data objects, and operations for recognizing the type of a given complex data object. We gain our language constructs by generalizing the corresponding solutions provided by conventional, record-based database models. This leads us from the ‘flat structures’ of traditional database models to ‘recursive structures’ allowing for flexible representations of non-formatted and highly related data as required for advanced office object modelling.