The Use of the Data Dictionary in DBMS based on Graphs

The user of a DBMS has a collection of schemas, programs, methods, etc… stored in different locations, all over her computer. At the moment no DBMS offers appropriate tools to manage these collections. In this paper, we propose a graph-based data dictionary for graph-based database models and languages. This data dictionary can be used as basis for tools that assists the user in searching large amounts of meta-information. Some example tools are proposed. Two types of aggregation are investigated as mechanisms to make the query graphs more compact. The first is based on the aggregation found in the entity-relationship model, the second uses the fact that the data-dictionary describes graphs.