Interactive object-oriented schema development

Interactive object-oriented schema development requires a tool that permits fine-grained, incremental capture of semantic intent in the form of atomic assertions and provides feedback to the user to reflect the consequences of the design. The paper describes a design tool that includes a graphical interface for schema entry and feedback, a conceptual reasoner to perform the deductions, and a schema generator that outputs the schema, in the data definition language of choice. The focus of the paper is on the conceptual reasoner, which operates by constructing a constraint network to represent the schema. The network, based on the concept of congruence closure, is a graphical representation of the semantics of the assertions