An object-oriented database model for a change management framework in workgroup computing systems

Abstract

Workgroup computing systems are emerging to support a group of users engaged in common tasks such as group decision making, engineering design, group scheduling, or collaborative writing. Since shared objects in the workgroup systems are constantly evolving, providing the users with synchronized and consistent views of the objects is important for achieving improved team productivity. This paper proposes an object-oriented model for a change management framework supporting workgroup systems to facilitate managing dependency relationships between shared objects and dependent user views and to coordinate change and propagation activities between the two in client-server computing environments. In developing the framework, this study firstly singles out the requirements of change management in workgroup systems and conceptualizes the change management mechanisms with transient shared objects. It secondly extends the mechanisms into a persistent transactional database computing and client-server computing environment. In so doing, it specifically employs an object-oriented database paradigm to seamlessly capture transient and persistent transactional objects in a single formalism and presents a set of well-modularized abstract object constructs facilitating dependency management and change notification mechanisms for workgroup computing systems. The proposed framework is developed on the basis of a commercial Object-oriented Database Management System (ODBMS) called OBJECTSTORE using the C++ programming language. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.