Pertanika J. Sci. & Techno!. 13(1): I - 21 (2005) ISSN: 0128-7680 © Universiti Putra Malaysia Press Developing Translation Rules for Converting Relational to Object Oriented Database Conceptual Schema Hamidah Ibrahim, Soon Lay Ki, Ali Mamat & Zaiton Muda Department of Computer Science Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology Universiti Putra Malaysia 43400 UPM, Serdang, Selangor, Malaysia E-mail: hamidah@fsktm.upm.edu.my Received: 27 November 2001 ABSTRAK Pangkalan data multi adalah satu persekutuan sistem pangkafan data teragih, heterogen dan berotonomi yang telah ujud. Kebiasaannya, proses integrasi adalah perlu dalam usaha membentuk satu sistem pangkalan data teragih yang heterogen. Proses ini secara amnya mengandungi dua fasa utama, iaitu fasa penterjemahan skema konseptual diikuti dengan fasa integrasi. Makalah ini mempersembahkan satu pendekatan penterjemahan untuk menukar skema pangkalan data hubungan kepada skema pangkalan data berorientasi objek. Pendekatan penterjemahan tersebut mengandungi satu set peraturan penterjemahan, yang berdasarkan kepada kebergantungan terangkum, atribut kunci dan jenis atribut. Satu prototaip alat penterjemahan skema pangkalan data, dipanggil RETOO dibangunkan berdasarkan kepada pendekatan penterjemahan yang dicadangkan. RETOO menerima skema pangkalan data hubungan sebagai data input dan men jan a skema pangkalan data berorientasi objek sebagai output. Pendekatan penterjemahan bukan sahaja dapat memelihara semantik skema pangkalan data hubungan terse but, tetapi juga meningkatkan semantik skema berorientasi objek yang diterjemahkan melalui konse(f permodelan data berorientasi objek. ABSTRACT A multidatabase is a confederation of pre-existing distributed, heterogeneous, and autonomous database system. Obviously, the integration process is essential in the effort of forming a distributed, heterogeneous database system. This process generally consists of two main phases, which are conceptual schema translation phase followed by the integration phase. This paper presents a translation approach to convert relational database schema to object-oriented database schema. The translation approach consists of a set of translation rules, which is based on inclusion dependencies, key attributes and types of attributes. A database schema translation tool prototype, called RETOO (RElational-To- Object-Qriented) is then developed based on the proposed translation approach. RETOO receives a relational database schema as input data and generates an object-oriented database schema as the output. The translation approach is not only able to maintain the semantics of the relational database schema, but also enhance the semantics of the translated object-oriented schema via object- oriented data modeling concepts. Keywords: Relational schema, object-oriented schema