An object data management system for supporting complex, advanced applications

COMANDOS IS an ESPRIT project aiming at the development an infrastructure for the design and support of distributed applications. Relevant requirements of these applications toward the design of management facilities include support for: multimedia, complex objects, distributed cooperative work, and preexisting applications. In this paper we present the major design issues for the development of a Data Management System able to support applications characterized by types of requirements. First the COMANDOS data model is briefty surveyed. The data model is object oriented: it easily allows incremental definitions of multimedia, complex objects. Then the most relevent functionalities of the Data Management System are described. The system has been designed in a way that it easily allows object storage, access, distribution. However, it also provides mechanisms so that experienced users can tailor object storage and distribution based on their needs. In particular an object storage language and an object distribution language have been designed that allow specification of sophisticated storage distribution schemas.