In Next Generation Information Systems (NGISs) data-oriented, behavioral and deductive aspects of data are integrated with each other. Data-oriented aspects determine what data are stored and how structural relationships among them are organized. Behavioral aspects are associated with calculations (functionalities) of stored data. Deductive aspects define derivation of new knowledge from the stored data. This study deals with these aspects and their integration from the modeling and related querying perspective of NGISs.

The is-a relationship, the part-of relationship and the association are three fundamental relationships among data in the real world. Therefore, in this study different aspects of data are considered on the basis of these relationships. Special attention is paid to the development of an advanced modeling and manipulation approach to complex part-of relationships, called physical assemblies. In addition to data in the structured databases it is also often necessary to manipulate textual information in advanced applications. Therefore we propose that the textual information and its related manipulation should be included in NGISs. In this study we assume that textual documents are represented by XML. This affords the possibility of also utilizing the information in XML documents in the specification of the behavioral and deductive aspects of data. Further we offer both the data-centric and document-centric view of XML. In the data-centric view XML elements are manipulated as in database queries, whereas in the document-centric view they are manipulated as in information retrieval. In this study we develop and extend the RDOOM (Relational Object-Oriented Modeling) method for modeling all essential aspects in NGISs. RDOOM is a concept-oriented modeling method intended to offer such modeling primitives in which application-specific concepts and structures can be embedded. From the viewpoint of the user, query formulation based on our approach resembles a combination of applications-specific concepts and structures and specification of conditions among them. In addition to conventional extensional queries the study deals with intensional queries, extensional-intensional queries and relevance ranking of XML elements.