Comparison of Some Data Models for Engineering Objects

Many proposals using object-oriented data models for engineering objects have appeared in the literature. These data models try to represent the data in engineering systems more naturally by organizing it logically and/or physically into objects relevant to the engineering applications using the database. In this article we review and examine several of these proposed data models to identif important properties of the models. We show that none of the data models excels in all areas, but each has desirable properties.