MOOD4-PC ver.1.11, release note MAR 27, 1993 ==================================================================== MOOD4-PC: Material's/Miniature Object-Oriented Database Prototype for NEC/IBM-PC, is an object-oriented database system(OODBS) program developed in the course of our research project MOOD. The aim of the project MOOD is to develop a material database system to handle raw material data which are produced and accumulated in materials research and referred to by material experts when they face scientific or engineering problems where the expected behavior of particular materials in particular environments are crucial importance. We all know that the conventional database systems do not fulfill this requirement, though they serves well for bibliographic databases or fact databases which deals with the standard properties of standard materials. We are, therefore, trying OODBS; even extending it by implementing features which are considered to be vital to process material data but not provided with the currently available OODBS's. Although MOOD is better than other OODBS in those aspects, we admit that it does not cover the all of general OODBS functionalities, because of its relatively short history and the power of PC's. Our program is yet valuable: - It is a specification of database system which materials scientists/engineers need but programmers have not provided. The same need is surely shared by scientists and engineers in many other fields of profession where the accumulated results of experiments and observations matter. - Although OODBS is currently of considerable interest, many of us do not have an access to the system. Because MOOD is an general purpose OODBS, You may use it to examine how your problems of data processing will be solved with OODBS on PC and have some grasp of the nature of OODBS, before you start talking with OODBS venders. We have so far made 3 releases which are the products of this effort: 1) MOOD/P3 Framework of MOOD system has been established here. It runs, however, only on NEC/PC-9801. 2) MOOD/P3-PC A clone of the above, made executable on IBM/PC. This release has been withdrawn when the next has been released. 3) MOOD4-PC, ver.1.00 The following features have been added here: (1) support of homonym and synonym. different classes with the same name are distinguished by their superclasses, synonym, and their slots. this saves us from the unnatural naming of classes otherwise necessary in order to put everything a unique name through out the database. the problem of system reserved words has also been solved. (2) summary class we have invented a summary class which holds a table of data points which have been obtained a series of experiments. this saves the load of inputting data and storage space. this form of recording conserves the implication embedded in the summarized data such as an interesting correlation between a experimental parameter and result. the summary class object, yet, matches the query made direct to the description of the experiment. (3) summarizing for a set of data objects which matched a query, we can invoke a "summarize" session in which we can edit a template object and execute the session. with this, we can extract and tabulate any parameters embedded in the individual retrieved objects. the obtained result can be written out to a file for the processing with other program, such as spread sheet. this functionality is a counterpart of query language such as SELECT-FROM-WHERE and better than this at least in a way: SELECT part, FROM part, and WHERE part are all editable in the summarize session. you can repeat edit/execute until you get satisfactory results. (4) class manager this manager allows you to; * travel and browse class hierarchy tree on PC screen. * select out one of them as an input value. * add new classes or delete unnecessary classes. * start editing of class definitions. The present release MOOD4-PC ver.1.11 is a minor updation of the last. Some bugs and inconveniences have been remedied and, above all, compiled program of MOOD4 which run stand alone is included in the release. Full description of MOOD4 is not ready yet. Please refer to, for the moment, the manual for MOOD/P3 and it supplement for MOOD4 extensions. We hope you will enjoy this program. Mails telling bugs and suggestions will be much appreciated. Noboru Ono Department of Machine Intelligence and Systems Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Tohoku University ono@mood.mech.tohoku.ac.jp