Interactive design of object-oriented schema

Interactive design of object-oriented schema requires a tool that permits fine-grained, incremental capture of semantic intent in the form of atomic assertions and provides user feedback reflecting the consequences of the design. The paper describes a design tool that includes a graphical interface for schema entry and feedback, a conceptual reasoner to perform the deductions, and a schema generator that outputs the data definition language of choice. The graphical interface is concerned with issues of object placement, line crossing, and object focus. The conceptual reasoner constructs a representation of the schema as a constraint network graph, based on the concept of congruence closure. The schema generator produces data definitions based on the deductions of the conceptual reasoner and the assertions given to the graphical interface