Object Oriented Model for Cluster Analysis in Environmental Risk Management

Abstract

This paper concerns the problem of object oriented modeling of cluster analysis and applying the model on environmental risk management. Cluster analysis is an exploratory method for classification objects and its usage is namely appropriate when little or nothing is known about an internal structure of examined data. Object oriented model enables to increase the possibilities of cluster analysis considerably. One of these possibilities facilitates interactive hierarchical clustering, which means adding new clusters to the current ones and continue with hierarchical clustering from the reached level of the hierarchical clustering. Actual state of clustering is stored and retrieved by using persistent store and persistent objects. Interactive hierarchical clustering and persistency of objects enable to create hypothetical classification structure of well proven data that is used for the new objects classification. Moreover objectoriented perspective enables modeling different hierarchical clustering methods with the benefit of exploiting virtual procedure mechanism. Described approach was tested on environmental data and the results can be used in environmental data risk management. The whole application is developed using the Mjolner BETA System and the BETA language for its rich facilities of the conceptual modeling.