Development of Component Software Architectures for Use with Massive Distributed Object Databases

Modeling real-world entities using software objects allows the development of functional objects that have self-knowledge and are reusable. These objects are sometime called software components, and can be used in a manner analogous to the integrated circuits in computer hardware. Information and knowledge stored in databases today consists of pure data possessing no inherent functionality or knowledge about itself. Users are given the burden of determining uses, capabilities, and relationships between data. It is possible to marry together the software component model with the object database model, allowing the construction of massive, distributed systems whose objects possess self-knowledge, facilitating users searching for information. Such a software component database would allow users to explore/browse functionality of components and use required components to build new software components. Users could create new components either by gluing together components to form aggregate components, or by inheriting the features of other components.