THE MODEL, LANGUAGE, AND IMPLEMENTATION OF AN OBJECT-ORIENTED MULTIMEDIA KNOWLEDGE-BASE MANAGEMENT-SYSTEM

New applications such as CAD, AI, and hypermedia require direct repres entation and flexible use of complex objects, behavioral knowledge, an d multimedia data. To this end, we have devised a knowledge base manag ement system called Jasmine. An object-oriented approach in a programm ing language also seems promising for use in Jasmine. Jasmine extends the current object-oriented approach and provides the following featur es. Our object model is based on functional data models and well-estab lished set theory. Attributes or functions composing objects can repre sent both structural and behavioral knowledge. The object model can re present incomplete and generic knowledge. The model can support the ba sic storage and operations of multimedia data. The facets of attribute s can flexibly represent constraints and triggers. The object manipula tion language can support associative access of objects. The structura l and behavioral knowledge can be uniformly treated to allow the user to specify complex object operations in a compact manner. The user-def ined and system-defined attributes can be uniformly specified to ease user customization of the language. The classes and instances can be u niformly accessed. Incomplete knowledge can be flexibly accessed. The system has a layered architecture. Objects are stored in nested relati ons provided by extensive DBMS as a sublayer. User query of objects is compiled into relational operations such select and join, which can b e efficiently processed using hashing. The behavioral knowledge is com piled into predicate and manipulation function interfaces that can dir ectly access tuples in a buffer.