On the systematic reuse of legacy data in distributed object-based enterprise resource planning software

The study concerns the development and testing of a systematic approach to reuse of legacy data. A key aspect of the approach is that it is designed to transform relational data, as might typically be stored in a source database, into object-oriented data. By building upon and extending the use of a set of general-purpose software engineering concepts the systematic approach has many potential application areas. However, within this study focus has been on testing the utility and practicality of the approach in the domain of enterprise resource planning (ERP). The systematic approach is based on a process consisting of four main steps, two of which are centred on the use of an algorithm which was conceived and developed to automate the processing of relational schema and data input by expert users so that object schema can be drawn out, new object classes can be added and redundant object classes removed. [Continues.]