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Classification – oriented database

A classification-oriented database was developed during the project

“Application of information technologies for the forest ecosystems modeling as an approach for development of DGVMs”

Directorate”Science”, Ministry of Education and Science

and related to action :

FP1106 | STReESS – Studying Tree Responses to extreme Events: a SynthesiS | 23 April 2012 – 22 April 2016

 

Database description

The description of material and ideal world can be considered as hierarchical organizations of categories.  A hierarchy can be viewed as structure consisting of categories connected with a relegation of subordination.  Each category defines a set of objects with same features. A category  can be considered as abstraction on these sets. Each category can be described with a set of attributes.  Objects are material or ideal instances of categories to which they  belong.  We say that objects are instances of their categories.

There are types of  category hierarchies .

First one is the hierarchy of  containment. For example a car contains engine, chassis, hatch bag etc. In object oriented terminology the containment relation between two categories can be one of  composition or aggregation.  In case of composition an object  cannot  exist  without any  composing parts. For example a car cannot exist or function properly without engine.  In this case we say that the category car and category engine are in composition relation.  But  a car can function without a hatch bag so this relegation is relation of aggregation.

Second type of hierarchy is inheritance or called parent-child relation.  Parent categories are broader than child categories.  For example the category living being if broader than animal.  In this case the former is a parent to latter category.

The classification oriented database facilitates description of complex material and ideal structures.

It allows creation of arbitrary category structures based on inheritance and containment relations.  It also allows object instantiating on each category.  A creation of instance is simply setting concrete values of a chosen category.  An arbitrary number of objects can be instantiated for each category.

A friendly graphical web interface is available for  users.

The features in construction are:

1. Adding personalized access to database by means of login credentials.

2. Adding program interface to database based on web services.

You can see a sample of the database still in development here.

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