Objects and domains for managing medical data and knowledge

This paper assesses the object-oriented data paradigm, and describes an algebraic approach which permits the generation of data objects from relational data, based on the knowledge captured in a formal Entity-Relationship model, the Structural Model. The advantage is that now objects can be created that satisfy a variety of particular views, as long as the hierarchies represented by the views are subsumed in the network represented by the overall structural model. The disadvantage of creating view-objects dynamically is that the additional layering has performance implications, so that the speedup expected from object-oriented databases versus relational databases, due to their hierarchical object storage, cannot be realized. However, scalability of systems is increased since large systems tend to have multiple objectives, and hence often multiple valid hierarchical views over the data. This approach has been implemented in the Penguin project, and recently some commercial successors are emerging. In truly large systems new problems arise, namely that now not only multiple views will exist, but also that the domains to be covered by the data will be autonomous and hence heterogeneous. One result is that ontologies associated with the multiple domains will differ as well. This paper proposes a knowledge-based algebra over the ontologies, so that the domain knowledge can be partitioned for maintenance. Only the articulation points, where the domains intersect, have to be agreed upon as defined by matching rules which define the shared ontologies.