Stepwise re-engineering and development of object-oriented database schemata

We present a general approach for re-engineering of object-oriented database schemata. The approach consists of four dependent steps: (1) description of the data within the underlying basic data format, (2) application of a powerful semantic data model in order to construct a semantic database schema, (3) translation of the achieved schema into a general object model, and (4) implementation of the object schema in a concrete object-oriented database system. As an instantiation of this general procedure we report on a case study carried out in an industrial context where an extended entity-relationship model was used as the semantic data model and ObjectStore as the implementation platform