Data integration for a software development environment - using an object-oriented OMS

There are different object management system (OMS) approaches, to manage the vast amount of documents which are generated and manipulated all along the software life cycle. They differ in their data models and, in particular, in their choices at the schema definition level. In this paper we show how an object-oriented OMS is used as a central means to support data integration. We describe the principle to model different kinds of documents and the approach used to convert them to a common OMS schema. With object-oriented features, such as types, methods and inheritance, the common OMS schema describes both coarse grained and fine grained objects to represent documents. The paper also contains sample implementations for typical documents which appear in a software life cycle.