Bottom-up scientific databases based on sets and their top-down usage

The paper proposes a data model for a scientific database. Scientific applications require the DBMS support of the discovery process. Unstructured or semi-structured scientific data is required for storage in databases, and manipulation as structured data. To meet these requirements, the proposed data model has the following features. It is based on the concept of sets in order that a database has flexible structure, a perspective of an object is represented with the subset of the object, and a collection of objects are naturally represented. A data value is the principal element for expressing polymorphism and sharing data flexibly. A preliminary database is adopted in order to store unstructured or semi-structured data without any definition. The attribute of data called shape, which varies according to the creation or updating of data, is introduced to query a database. The authors present the application of the model to the archeological data in order to demonstrate its advantages.