Modeling transition

It is argued that the dynamics of an application domain is best modeled as patterns of change in the entities that make up the domain. An abstraction mechanism for semantic data models is described which represents the transition of domain entities among entity classes. The model of transitions is related to a general computational formalism with well-understood properties. It is shown that the transition abstraction mechanism facilitates the accurate conceptual modeling of the static nature of the domain, assists in the design of database transactions, enables certain kinds of inference, and leads to the ability of a database to actively respond at a high level to low level updates of the data it contains