Towards a better understanding of data models through themultilingual database system

An approach to the design of a database system, the multilingual database system (MLDS), has been proposed and implemented. MLDS is a single database system that can execute may transactions written respectively in different data languages and support many databases structured correspondingly in various data models, i.e. DL/I transactions on hierarchical databases, CODASYL-DML transactions on network databases, SQL transactions on relational databases, and Daplex transactions on functional databases. The authors describe MLDS, focusing on its motivation and structure. It is shown how MLDS, by providing an integrated environment for experimenting with data models and data languages, also serves as a testbed that provides insight to data models and data-model semantics, using qualitative and quantitative techniques. Related work on data-language comparison and analysis is indicated