ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors present an Object Oriented conceptual model which combines the assets of the conventional semantic models with the advantages of the Object Oriented approach. They propose methodological guide-lines for helping the analyst in the selection of candidate objects, the identification of the pertinent ones, their structure and their classification in the inheritance hierarchy. An object is a conception of a persistent phenomenon of the application domain, which contains relevant information for the future database application. An object may be considered at two levels: the type level and the instance level. Objects can relate one to another in three different ways: by composition, by referring and through inheritance hierarchies. According to the composition link, objects can be classified into simple objects and composite objects. The inheritance link is a mean of object schemes factorisation through the specialisation and the generalisation mechanisms.
