An Information Management Environment Based on the Model of Object Primitives

The explosive emergence of distributed computing environments and component-based architectures increases the demand for flexible information modeling paradigms. A review of the state-of-the-art shows that contemporary modeling methods and technology, such as object-orientation (OO) and CORBA, facilitate to an extent the functional integration of heterogeneous information management systems. However, there are still issues to be resolved that mainly involve (i) the inflexibility of modeling semantics adopted by OO methods, (ii) the complication of developing new service components and their deployment in a distributed management environment. This chapter attempts to pinpoint some of those difficulties and suggests ways to overcome them. In this direction, we give a short overview of the problems encountered in the current state-of-the-art that act as motivation for this research. In response to challenges identified, we then continue on two main strands of analysis, one theoretical and one practical. In the theoretical part we introduce the Model of Object Primitives. It aims at providing a more flexible way to model information. The main objective here is to simply pinpoint the basic principles and elements of the model and not provide a thorough analysis of its semantics. The semantics of the model is analytically described in (Georgalas, 2000). Finally, in the practical part we present an information management architecture that adopts the idea of primitives in order to build components and deliver information services to client applications.