A generic data model for the support of multiple user interaction facilities

User interaction facilities are usually the weakest component of DBMS. They are typically few in number and quite impoverished when compared both to other features of DBMS and to user interaction facilities for other kinds of software. One reason for this is that adding further mechanisms requires tedious and repetitive programming effort in the context of a complex system. The Configurable Data Modelling System (CDMS) attempts to get round this problem by providing an environment in which interaction facilities can be built more easily. CDMS considers a user interaction facility to be the pairing of a conceptual data model with a concrete user interface. CDMS provides a generic data model, comprising elements for describing data structures, constraints and active values, together with one menu driven system for creating conceptual models as instances of the generic model and another for creating user interfaces to each data model thus generated. This papers describes the important features of the former system. The principal difficulty in creating such a system is achieving a clear, consistent and coherent analysis of all of the components which might be housed in a DBMS and this is discussed in the paper.