Virtual structures — A technique for supporting scientific database applications

Amazonia is based on a comprehensive model that includes a characterization of the development, representation, and evaluation of the concepts employed by scientists in their modeling of both the phenomena of interest and the process of modeling itself. It builds a framework for translating our conceptual model of scientific activity into a simple, unified, computational specification. CML is very simple to use and largely declarative in nature. Virtual R-Structures provide a means of integrating external software tools and smaller code executables (in Fortran, C, Pascal etc.) very easily in the modeling environment. The tool management system provides a generic technique which allows Amazonia to “start” a subsystem (external tool) as a background “server” process and to establish the communication channels between the main system and the server process.