Supporting user views

Any emerging standard for object-oriented database systems must include a rich view support mechanism. A user view is a customized window into an application domain. It may be thought of as a simplifying abstraction which hides information that is not accessible to, needed or wanted by a particular user. Because they limit the information available from a given perspective, most views allow read-only access to a database. In this paper it is asserted that by generalizing object identity to include attributes and views - many view updates are made possible. An extended object structure and several categories of view transformation are also presented which allow all user views to be modeled within a single polymorphic database schema.