What is Access Path

The concept-oriented model (CoM) is a new approach to data modeling (Savinov, 2004) that is being developed along with concept-oriented programming (CoP) (Savinov, 2005a). Its major goal consists of providing simple and effective means for representing and manipulating multidimensional and hierarchical data while retaining the possibility to model how the data are represented physically. Thus, this model has two sides or flavors: logical and physical. From the point of view of logical structure, CoM belongs to a class of multidimensional models (Agrawal, Gupta, & Sarawagi, 1997; Gyssens & Lakshmanan, 1997; Li & Wang, 1996) and OLAP technologies (Berson & Smith, 1997). The main difference from the existing approaches is that CoM is based on the theory of ordered sets. Particularly, one source of inspiration when developing CoM was formal concept analysis (FCA) and lattice theory (Ganter & Wille, 1999).