Abstract
Concurrent engineering seeks to reduce the length of the design life cycle by allowing multiple engineers to work on a design concurrently using their different design tools. A major stumbling block in achieving this goal is that most design tools use different file formats. Emerging standards such as STEP/PDES/EXPRESS reduce this barrier, but conformance to standards is not enough. One reason design tools have different file formats is because each tool requires a different perspective or view of the design. Engineering databases must provide designers with the ability to define application specific views of design data, and the ability to propagate changes among those related views. In this paper, we examine how an object-oriented database system can support the definition of application views using a class hierarchy and multiple inheritance.
