Abstract
Inheritance conflicts in class hierarchies are avoidable through design that considers application semantics. An algorithm, in the form of IF-THEN statements, is presented that resolves any name conflicts in class hierarchies. Several examples are given which show that conflicts arise because of poor design. These conflicts can be resolved by redesigning the schema, renaming properties, redefining (or overriding) an overloaded property, factoring attributes to a more general class, removing redundant ISA relationships and/or explicitly selecting an inheritance path.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
R. Agrawal, N. H. Gehani: ODE (Object database and environment): The language and the data model. Proc. ACM-SIGMOD Intl. Conf. on Management of Data. 1989, pp. 36–45.
R.J. Brachman: What IS-A is and isn't. Computer. Vol 16 No 10, Oct 1983, pp. 30–36.
P.P. Chen: The entity-relationship model: toward a unified view of data. ACM Transactions on Database Systems. Vol 1 No 1, 1976.
O. Deux et al: The story of O2. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering. Vol 2 No 1, Mar 1990, pp. 91–108.
D. Fishman et al: IRIS: An object oriented database management system. ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems. Vol 5 No 1, Jan 87, pp. 48–69.
W. Kim: An introduction to object-oriented databases. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1990.
L. Rowe, M. Stonebraker: The Postgres data model. The Postgres Papers, Memo No. UCB/ERL M86/85. University of California, Berkeley, Jun 1987 (Revised).
D. Touretzky: Implicit Ordering of Defaults in Inheritance Systems. Proc. AAAI-84, Austin, Texas, 1984, pp. 322–325.
S. Zdonik D. Maier: Fundamentals of object-oriented database systems. Readings in Object-Oriented Database Systems. Morgan Kaufman, San Mateo, Ca., 1990, pp. 1–32.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1993 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Ling, T.W., Teo, P.K. (1993). Inheritance conflicts in object-oriented systems. In: MaÅ™Ãk, V., Lažanský, J., Wagner, R.R. (eds) Database and Expert Systems Applications. DEXA 1993. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 720. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-57234-1_17
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-57234-1_17
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-57234-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-47982-6
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive