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The design and implementation of a DBMS component which permits user access facilities to be constructed out of a toolbox of components rather than by programming. The user access facilities comprise a data model and a concrete user interface and the system is intended to cover not only the structural aspects of the database but also constraints and dynamic components.Progress:The work has proceeded by analysis of user access to databases managed by DBMS. From this an architecture was constructed which consisted of a four layer instantiation hierarchy - a database is an instance of a schema which is an instance of a data model, which in turn is an instance of a unifying global model. The global model contains the toolbox of data modelling constructs out of which data models can be constructed. Once a data model has been constructed in can be associated with a concrete user interface. Both of these constructional activities are carried out with a menu-driven interface.A version of this has been implemented which enables the structural aspects to be modelled. Furthermore, constraints have been analysed so that all of the constraints which appear in a DBMS are put into a unifying framework. The design for including this in the main implementation is complete although the implementation itself is not. The dynamic part of the work has been analysed, but an implementation has yet to be designed.At the same time, a small, partially animated multimedia document illustrating some of the main ideas in CDMS has been built using MacroMind Director.The work has been the subject of the following refereed papers:Cooper R.L., Configurable Data Modelling Systems , Proc. of 9th Conference on the Entity Relationship Approach, 35-52, Lausanne, October 1990.Cooper R.L. and Qin Z., A Graphical Data Modelling Program with Constraint Specification and Management , in Advanced Database Systems , P.M.D. Gray and R. Lucas (ed), LNCS618, Springer Verlag, 1992.England, D and Cooper, R.L., Reconfigurable User Interfaces to Databases , in User Interfaces to Databases< R. Cooper (ed), Springer Verlag, 1993. Paton N., Cooper R.L., England D., al-Qaimari G. and Kilgour A.C., Integrated Architecture for Database Interface Development , Proceedings of the IEE, March 1994.Cooper R.L., Configuring Database Query Languages , Proc. 2nd International Workshop on Database Systems, Ambleside, England, July, 1994.Cooper R.L. and Qin Z., A Generic Data Model for the Support of Multiple User Interaction Facilities , Proc. International Conference on the Entity Relationship Approach, Manchester, England, December 1994.
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