The development, production, and maintenance of complex engineering products is supported by various heterogeneous CAx tools, each with its own underlying data management system. While for complex products the replacement of this family of tools by an integrated and consistent environment is far beyond today's technological capabilities, at least the different data management systems being used have to be integrated.

Consequently, the main objective of the project IDEE (Integration of Data in Engineering Environments) is the development of an object-oriented integration framework to support a tightly coupled database federation of various engineering tools. The federation shall provide for:

• error-free data transfer from one tool to another,
• data consistency across different tools,
• a global view of all product-related data,
• different global views at different levels of abstraction, and
• version management at the global layer.

Martin Schönhoff, Markus Strässler;
Issues of Global Versioning in Federated Database Systems for Engineering Environments;
10. Workshop "Grundlagen von Datenbanken", Konstanz, Germany, June 1998

Markus Strässler, Martin Schönhoff;
Integrating Engineering Databases: How Does the Application Domain Influence the FDBMS Architecture?;
Proceedings 3. Workshop "Föderierte Datenbanken", Magdeburg, 10./11. Dezember 1998. Shaker Verlag, Aachen, 1998

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