Based on the proceedings of a workshop held at the Appin in August 1985, this book discusses the issues of data abstraction. It introduces the concept of inheritance as a method of polymorphic modelling. It also discusses the issues of controlled access to large scale data in a concurrent and distributed persistent environment.

Research into Fully Integrated Data Environments (FIDE) has the goal of substantially improving the quality of application systems while reducing the cost of building and maintaining them. Application systems invariably involve the long-term storage of data over months or years. Much unnecessary complexity obstructs the construction of these systems when conventional databases, file systems, operating systems, communication systems, and programming languages are used. This complexity limits the sophistication of the systems that can be built, generates operational and usability problems, and...

There is a growing interest in integrating databases and programming languages. In recent years the programming language community has developed new models of computation such as logic programming, object-oriented programming and functional programming, to add to the well established von Neumann model. The data base community has almost independently developed more and more sophisticated data models to solve the problems of large scale data organisation. To make use of these new models in programming languages there must be an awareness of the problems of large scale data. The data base...