A transaction management framework for collaborative engineering

This paper discusses the various novel functionalities of a transaction management system for collaborative engineering applications. These features include grouped and shared transactions, dynamic database partitioning, communicative locking, dependency maintenance, update notification schemes, and version management of data configurations. It also establishes protocols for data consistency maintenance on the basis of application semantics and encapsulation of nonserializable data sharing in local databases rather than by the notion of global database consistency. Finally, it presents strategies for implementing these features using a commercial object oriented database management system (OODBMS) environment (ONTOS).