CLASSIC: A Structural Data Model for Objects

Summary: CLASSIC proposes a structural object model with intensional descriptions, enabling open-world, partial specs and queries that return extensional results or universal properties. It uses a uniform, extensible schema and language for defining, populating, querying, and reasoning, with active class discovery and forward-chaining for tractable expressiveness beyond deductive DBMS. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 2490
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 1989
Pagerank: 6.6401432e-05
Overall Rank: 4,540 | 68.86%
DOI: 10.1145/67544.66932

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Alexander Borgida (Rutgers University)
2. Ronald J. Brachman (AT&T)
3. Deborah L. McGuinness (AT&T)
4. Lori Alperin Resnick (AT&T)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{borgida_sigmod89,
        title = {{CLASSIC: A Structural Data Model for Objects}},
        author = {Borgida, Alexander and Brachman, Ronald J. and McGuinness, Deborah L. and Resnick, Lori Alperin},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '89},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/67544.66932},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/67544.66932},
        year = {1989}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 6 of 6 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
282	Efficient Management of Transitive Relationships in Large Data and Knowledge Bases	1989	SIGMOD	0.0002242162
917	Data Integration: The Teenage Years	2006	VLDB	0.00013224381
1,609	Managing Semantic Heterogeneity in Databases : A Theoretical Perspective	1997	PODS	0.00010225236
1,787	Adapting Materialized Views after Redefinitions	1995	SIGMOD	9.7681572e-05
2,201	Querying Network Directories	1999	SIGMOD	8.9653966e-05
2,612	Loading Data into Description Reasoners	1993	SIGMOD	8.3460356e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 2 of 2 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
15	The Functional Data Model and the Data Language DAPLEX	1979	SIGMOD	0.00061144858
63	An Amateur's Introduction to Recursive Query Processing Strategies	1986	SIGMOD	0.00038782376

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