An incremental and semi-automatic method inheritance graph hierarchy construction

In [16] we proposed a semi automatic method for generating inheritance graph hierarchy to assist the designer during the definition of a conceptual schema. The motivation of this work was the very few approaches which attempt to provide methods and tools for designing inheritance graph in object databases [30], and object software [1]. To address some limitations found in our work, we propose a new method whose principles are : (i) From a binary relation which represents the links between entities and their properties and methods, our proposed heuristic generates and organizes incrementally a set of Optimal rectangles into a Brute Inheritance Graph (BIG). (ii) BIG is refined and submitted to the designer. (iii) The designer can modify, add or remove classes, attributes or methods in the binary relation and activates steps (i) until he obtains a proper class hierarchy or an Optimal Inheritance Graph.