Access Enhancement Objects for data management in Smalltalk

This paper reports an approach to persistence in object-oriented languages, such as Smalltalk, that require a memory-resident image for computation. The architecture uses a selective persistence that provides sufficient data-handling, with support to evolutionary data description and data consultation, for an engineering domain application without any special syntactic extension to the application language.The approach is oriented to knowledge representation and has been tested on materials data information, from several sources, that informs engineering design modelling.The architecture described is an extension of Smalltalk that uses Access Enhancement Objects, which we term Persistence Enhancers, for data management, in conjunction with a storage model optimized for domain modelling.