Persistent Object Systems and Interoperability: Linguistic and Architectural Requirements

An important aspect of currently developed persistent object systems is support for interoperability with other systems. A central issue in supporting interoperability is achieving type compatibility. We argue that abstraction is also a key interoperability issue. The level of abstraction depends on such features as modularity, encapsulation, orthogonality, minimality, clean and precise semantics, universality, extensibility, type safety and genericity, and others. In the paper we discuss these concepts and some architectures of gateways. 1 Introduction The term interoperability refers to the ability of independently developed systems to operate with each other. In the database domain interoperability is recently of special importance. The communication cost in computer networks is rapidly decreased, data storages are cheaper, databases become larger, and their content covers more and more important aspects of humans' life; thus demands of database clients concerning convenient access..