Application-oriented design of structure, semantics, and operations: improvement of design and performance

The present introductory overview, like this work as a whole, aims to give researchers in the areas of conceptual database design a picture of the prospects and difficulties associated with user modelling applied to conceptual database design and to show them where further ideas and information can be found. A sample application is carefully examined in order to learn from or about it. The article introduces us to an inductive inference mechanism as used in a design system to solve one main design problem: select a plausible atomic design primitive, i.e. a transaction on the design database, using design situation dependent arguments / pieces of evidence and generic design primitives. Further, we propose bookkeeping of user-executed design transactions and design decisions. A modular design methodology is presented: design-by-units and its graphical realisation demonstrated for the design database scheme. The modular structure of the design system architecture has been developed. (orig.)SIGLEAvailable from TIB Hannover: RR 8073(1997,8) / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekDeutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), Bonn (Germany)DEGerman