Perspectives of a semantic schema

This paper presents the notion of forming user perspectives over a semantic schema. Perspectives are a mechanism for providing user-oriented views of abstract objects. The perspectives of interest to each user group are collected into user views to provide a modularization tool for semantic schemas. A novel aspect of the approach to forming perspectives is that the semantics expressed within a schema are actively used to present design alternatives in the formation of perspectives and in the manner in which exception violations are handled. As a result, perspectives and their associated update operations are developed in a manner that conforms to the integrity constraints of the underlying semantic schema.