FROM DATABASE TO DATAWAREHOUSE: A DESIGN QUALITY EVALUATION

Maurizio Pighin and Lucio Ieronutti

Data Warehousing provides tools and techniques for collecting, integrating and storing a large number of transactional data extracted from operational Databases, with the aim of deriving accurate management information that can be effectively used for supporting decision processes. However, the choice of which attributes have to be considered as dimensions and which as measures heavily influences the effectiveness of a data warehouse. Since this is not a trivial task, especially for databases characterized by a large number of tables and attributes, an expert is often required for correctly selecting the most suitable attributes and assigning them the correct roles. In this paper, we then propose a semantic-independent methodology targeted at (i) supporting the data warehouse design and creation, and (ii) deriving information on total quality of the built Data Warehouse. We also present the results of an experiment demonstrating the effectiveness of our methodology.

PTSM: A PORTLET SELECTION MODEL

Mª Ángeles Moraga, Coral Calero, Mario Piattini and Oscar Díaz

The use of Web portals continues to rise, showing their importance in the current information society. The success of a portal depends on customers using and returning to it. Nowadays, it is very easy for users to change from one portal to another, so improving/assessing portal quality is a must. Hence, appropriate quality model should be available to measure and drive portal development. Specifically, this work focuses on portlet-based portals. Portlets are web components, and they can be thought as COTS but in a Web setting. This paper presents a portlet selection model that guides the portal developer in choosing the best portlet, among a set of portlets with similar functions for specified tasks and user objectives, in accordance to five quality measures, namely, functionality, reliability, usability, efficiency and reusability, and other three characteristics not related to the quality but important to carry out the selection.

TRANSFORMATION OF LEGACY BUSINESS SOFTWARE INTO CLIENT-SERVER ARCHITECTURES

Thomas Rauber and Gudula Rünger

Business software systems in use contain specific knowledge which is essential for the enterprise using the software and the software has often grown over years. However, it is difficult to adapt these software systems to the rapidly changing hardware and software technologies. This so-called legacy problem is extremely cost intensive when a change in the software itself or the hardware platform is required due to a change in the business processes of the enterprise or the hardware technology. Thus, a common problem in business software is the cost effective analysis, documentation, and transformation of business software. In this paper, we concentrate on the transformation issue of software systems and propose an incremental process for transforming monolithic business software into client-server architectures. The internal logical structure of the software system is used to create software components in a flexible way. The transformation process is supported by a transformation toolset which preserves correctness and functionality.

INFORMATION SYSTEMS INTEGRATION DURING MERGERS - INTEGRATION MODES TYPOLOGY AND INTEGRATION PATHS

Gérald Brunetto

Today Information Systems (IS) integration constitutes one of the major success factors of mergers and acquisitions. This article draws on two case studies of firms having realized more than 10 mergers and acquisitions between 1990 and 2000. This paper shows the importance of carrying out a double approach to understand IS integration process. The first approach represents the necessity of using organizational configuration to define possible IS integration modes. Thus we show the importance of organizational, strategic and technological contingencies within the elaboration of integration mode.

ENTERPRISE INFORMATION SEARCH SYSTEMS FOR HETEROGENEOUS CONTENT REPOSITORIES

Trieu C. Chieu, Shyh-Kwei Chen and Shiwa S. Fu

In larger enterprises, business documents are typically stored in disparate, autonomous content repositories with various formats. Efficient search and retrieval mechanisms are needed to deal with the heterogeneousness and complexity of this environment. This paper presents a general architecture and two industrial implementations of a service-based information system to perform search in Lotus Notes databases and data sources with Web service interfaces. The first implementation is based on a federated database system that maps the various schemas of the sources into a common interface and aggregates information from their native locations. This implementation offers the advantages of scalability and accessibility to real-time information. The second one is based on a one-index enterprise-scale search engine that crawls, parses and indexes the document contents from the sources. This latter implementation offers the ability of scoring the relevance ranking of documents and eliminating duplications in search results. The relative merits and limitations of both implementations will be presented.

A FRAMEWORK FOR SUPPORTING KNOWLEDGE WORK PROCESSES

Weidong Pan, Igor Hawryszkiewycz and Dongbei Xue

Improving knowledge work processes has become increasingly important for modern enterprises to maintain a competitive status in nowadays information society. This paper will propose a way to improve knowledge work processes through supportive services. A framework for supporting knowledge work processes will be presented where the best practices of knowledge work processes, developed by process organizers or derived from some successful applications, are described and stored in a database, and according to the description, software agents dynamically organize supportive services to guide process participants to advance process steps towards an efficient completion of the process. The paper will provide an overview of the method and explore the development of the main components involved in the framework.

A NEW LOOK INTO DATA WAREHOUSE MODELLING

Nikolay Nikolov

The dominating paradigm of Data Warehouse design is the star schema (Kimball, 1996). The main debate within the scientific community for years has been not whether this paradigm is really the only way, but, rather, on its details (e.g. “to snowflake or not to snowflake” – Kimball et al., 1998). Shifting the emphasis of the discourse entirely within the star schema paradigm prevents the search for better alternatives. We argue that the star schema paradigm is an artefact of the transactional perspective and does not account for the analytic perspective. The most popular formalized method for deriving the star schema (Golfarelli et al., 1998) underlines just that by taking only the entity-relationship-model (ERM) as an input. Although this design approach follows the natural data and work-flow, it does not necessarily offer the best performance. The main thrust of our argument is that the query model should be used on a par with the ERM as a starting point in the data warehouse design process. The rationale is that the end design should reflect not just the structure inherent in the data model, but also that of the expected workload. Such approach results in a schema which may look very different than the traditional star schema but the performance improvement it may achieve justifies going off-the-beaten track.

AN ORDER ALLOCATION MODEL IN VIRTUAL ENTERPRISES BASED ON INDUSTRIAL CLUSTERS

Fangqi Cheng, Feifan Ye and Jianguo Yang

Industrial clusters can be found very often in the world, particularly in many developing countries. In the age of internationalisation and a highly competitive environment with shorter product life cycles, more customized needs and more uncertainties in markets, to build virtual enterprise based on an industrial cluster is one of the most important ways to improve the agility and competitiveness of manufacturing enterprises in the cluster. One of the key factors towards the success of virtual enterprises is the correct selection of cooperative partners in the virtual enterprise. An approach of order allocation and partner selection in the environment of industrial clusters is proposed. This approach is composed of two stages: task-resource matching and quantitative evaluation. In the first stage the potential candidates are identified and in the second stage evolutionary programming is applied to deal with partner selection and order allocation problem. The architecture for information evaluation and order allocation is studied for the proposed approach. The target function, in which the load rate of candidate enterprise is taken as the main variable, is developed, and a simplified example is used to verify the feasibility of the proposed approach. The result suggests that the proposed model and the algorithm obtain satisfactory solutions. It is expected that the proposed approach can efficiently improve the manufacturing resource’s utilization and enhance the agility of manufacturing enterprises in industrial clusters by means of virtual enterprise.

A DATABASE INTEGRATION SYSTEM BASED ON GLOBAL VIEW GENERATION

Uchang Park and Ramon Lawrence

Database integration is a common and growing challenge with the proliferation of database systems, data warehouses, data marts, and other OLAP systems in organizations. Although there are many methods of sharing data between databases, true interoperability of database systems requires capturing, comparing, and merging the semantics of each system. In this work, we present a database integration system that improves on the database federation architecture by allowing domain administrators to simply and efficiently capture database semantics. The semantic information is combined using a tool for producing a global view. Building the global view is the bottleneck in integration because there are few tools that support its construction, and these tools often require sophisticated knowledge and experience to operate properly. The technique and tool presented is simple and powerful enough to be used by all database administrators, yet expressive enough to support the majority of integration queries

UNASSSUMING VIEW-SIZE ESTIMATION TECHNIQUES IN OLAP - AN EXPERIMENTAL COMPARISON

Kamel Aouiche and Daniel Lemire

Even if storage was infinite, a data warehouse could not materialize all possible views due to the running time and update requirements. Therefore, it is necessary to estimate quickly, accurately, and reliably the size of views. Many available techniques make particular statistical assumptions and their error can be quite large. Unassuming techniques exist, but typically assume we have independent hashing for which there is no known practical implementation. We adapt an unassuming estimator due to Gibbons and Tirthapura: its theoretical bounds do not make unpractical assumptions. We compare this technique experimentally with stochastic probabilistic counting, LogLog probabilistic counting, and multifractal statistical models. Our experiments show that we can reliably and accurately (within 10%, 19 times out 20) estimate view sizes over large data sets (1.5 GB) within minutes, using almost no memory. However, only Gibbons-Tirthapura provides universally tight estimates irrespective of the size of the view. For large views, probabilistic counting has a small edge in accuracy, whereas the competitive sampling-based method (multifractal) we tested is an order of magnitude faster but can sometimes provide poor estimates (relative error of 100%). In our tests, LogLog probabilistic counting is not competitive. Experimental validation on the US Census 1990 data set and on the Transaction Processing Performance (TPC~H) data set is provided.

IMPLEMENTING SPATIAL DATAWAREHOUSE HIERARCHIES IN OBJECT-RELATIONAL DBMSS

Elzbieta Malinowski and Esteban Zimányi

Spatial Data Warehouses (SDWs) allow to analyze historical data represented in a space supporting the decision-making process. SDW applications require a multidimensional view of data that includes dimensions with hierarchies and facts with associated measures. In particular, hierarchies are important since traversing them users can analyze detailed and aggregated measures. To better represent users' requirements for SDWs, the conceptual model with spatial support should be used. Afterwards, the conceptual schema is translated to the logical and physical schemas. However, during the translation process the semantics can be lost. In this paper, we present the translation of spatial hierarchies from the conceptual to physical schemas represented in the MultiDimER model and Oracle 10g Spatial, respectively. Further, to ensure the semantic equivalence between the conceptual and the physical schemas, integrity constraints are exemplified mainly using triggers.

TEXT ANALYTICS AND DATA ACCESS AS SERVICES - A CASE STUDY IN TRANSFORMING A LEGACY CLIENT-SERVER TEXT ANALYTICS WORKBENCH AND FRAMEWORK TO SOA

E. Michael Maximilien, Ying Chen, Ana Lelescu, James Rhodes, Jeffrey Kreulen and Scott Spangler

As business information is made available via the intranet and Internet, there is a growing need to quickly analyze the resulting mountain of information to infer business insights. For instance, analyzing a company’s patent database against another’s to find the patents that are cross licensable. IBM Research’s Business Insight Workbench (BIW) is a text mining and analytics tool that allows end–users to explore, understand, and analyze business information in order to come up with such insight. However, the first incarnation of BIW used a thick-client architecture with a database back-end. Though very successful, the architecture caused limitations in the tool’s flexibility, scalability, and deployment. In this paper we discuss our initial experiences in converting BIW into a modern Service-Oriented Architecture. We also provide some insights into our design choices and also outline some lessons learned.

A NEW ALGORITHM FOR TWIG PATTERN MATCHING

Yangjun Chen

Tree pattern matching is one of the most fundamental tasks for XML query processing. Prior work has typically decomposed the twig pattern into binary structural (parent-child and ancestor-descendent) relationships or paths, and then stitch together these basic matches by join operations. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm which explores both the document tree and the twig pattern in a bottom-up way and show that the join operation can be completely avoided. The new algorithm runs in O(|T|Þ|Q|) time and O(|Q|ÞleafT) space, where T and Q are the document tree and the twig pattern query, respectively; and leafT represents the number of leaf nodes in T. Our experiments show that our method is effective, scalable and efficient in evaluating twig pattern queries.

A METHOD FOR EARLY CORRESPONDENCE DISCOVERY USING INSTANCE DATA

Indrakshi Ray and C. J. Michael Geisterfer

In the database integration research, much effort has gone into developing automated solutions to integrating the schema (and then, afterwards, the data itself). In most of the research literature, the solutions and approaches have concentrated on matching schema-level information to determine the correspondences between data concepts in the component databases. If instance-level information is even utilized, it is used only to augment the correspondences found using the schema-level information, to catch what the schema-level matching missed. To use schema-level information, the component schemas must be transformed to a canonical data model before they can be compared. Furthermore, this bases for database integration has a strong reliance on the availability of schema experts, schema documentation, and well-designed schemas - items that are often not available. The main contribution of this paper is to propose a method of initial instance-based correspondence discovery that greatly reduces the manual effort involved in the current integration processes. The gains are accomplished because the ensuing method uses only instance data (a body of database knowledge that is always available) to make its initial discoveries. A secondary contribution will be to show that correspondence discovery before schemas transformation is a viable, even desired alternative to the current general integration process.

XML SCHEMA STRUCTURAL EQUIVALENCE

Angela C. Duta, Ken Barker and Reda Alhajj

The Xequiv algorithm determines when two XML schemas are equivalent based on their structural organization. It calculates the percentages of schema inclusion in another schema by considering the cardinality of each leaf node and its interconnection to other leaf nodes that are part of a sequence or choice structure. Xequiv is based on the Reduction Algorithm that focuses on the leaf nodes and eliminates intermediate levels in the XML tree.

SECURE KNOWLEDGE EXCHANGE BY POLICY ALGEBRA AND ERML

Steve Barker and Paul Douglas

In this paper, we demonstrate how role-based access control policies may be used for secure forms of knowledge module exchange in an open, distributed environment. For that, we define an algebra that a security administrator may use for defining compositions and decompositions of shared information sources, and we describe a markup language for facilitating secure information exchange amongst heterogeneous information systems. We also describe an implementation of our approach and we give some performance measures, which offer evidence of the feasibility of our proposal.

MAINTENANCE COST OF A SOFTWARE DESIGN: A VALUE-BASED APPROACH

Daniel Cabrero, Javier Garzás and Mario Piattini

Alternative valid software design solutions can give response to the same software product requirements. In addition, a great part of the success of a software project depends on the selected software design. However, there are few methods to quantify how much value will be added by each design strategy, and hence very little time is spent choosing the best design option. This paper presents a new approach to estimate and quantify how profitable is to improve a design solution. This will be achieved by estimating the maintenance cost of a software project using two main variables: The probability of change of each design artifact, and the cost associated to each change. Two techniques are proposed in this paper to support this approach: COCM (Change-Oriented Configuration Management) and CORT (Change-Oriented Requirement Tracing).

THE CHALLENGES FACING GLOBAL ERP SYSTEMS IMPLEMENTATIONS

Paul Hawking, Andrew Stein and Susan Foster

Large global companies are increasing looking towards information systems to standardise business processes and enhance decision making across their operations in different countries In particular these companies are implementing enterprise resource planning systems to provide this standardisation. This paper is a review of literature which focusses on the use of ERP systems to support global operations. There are many technological and cultural challenges facing these implementations. However a major challenge faced by companies is the balance between centralisation and localisation.

INCENTIVES AND OBSTACLES IN IMPLEMENTING INTER-ORGANISATIONAL INTEROPERABILITY

Raija Halonen and Veikko Halonen

This paper explores the incentives and obstacles that rise when implementing interoperability in organisations. In the focus we have an inter-organisational information system especially in a context with the information system having interfaces with several information systems managed by different organisations. Information systems are implemented because they bring along several benefits: they enable interaction between organisations without physical attendance; they enable information to be forwarded across organisational borders; they enable organisations better to compete in the market; and they enable organisations to partner with each other. In this respect, inter-organisational information systems differ from other information systems. Inter-organisational information systems often are linked with information systems that are aimed to support functionalities in the partnering organisations and that are implemented earlier, even several years earlier in the organisations. We limit this paper to consider only inter-organisational information systems that are implemented to support pre-defined joint functionalities.

KNOWLEDGE-MASHUPS AS NEXT GENERATION WEBBASED SYSTEMS - CONVERGING SYSTEMS VIA SELF-EXPLAINING SERVICES

Thomas Bopp, Birger Kühnel, Thorsten Hampel, Christian Prpitsch and Frank Lützenkirchen

Webservice-based architectures are facing new challegenges in terms of convergence of systems. By example of a webservice integration of a digital repository/library, systems of knowledge management in groups, and learning management systems this contribution shows new potentials of flexible, descriptive webservices. Digital libraries are understood in their key position as searching, structuring, and archiving instances of digital media and they actively provide services in this sense. The goal of this article is to introduce services suitable for everyday use for coupling different system classes. Conceptually, the requirements of a possible standard in the area of convergence of knowledge management, digital libraries, and learning management systems are discussed. The results are publish and search services with negotiation capabilities with a low-barrier for adoption.

A FRAMEWORK FOR MODEL-DRIVEN PATTERN MATCHING

Ignacio García-Rodríguez de Guzmán, Macario Polo and Mario Piattini

Today, software technology is evolving to model engineering. Standards such as MOF and MDA and languages such as QVT and ATL are emerging to support this evolution from object paradigm to model engineering. At times, these standards and languages give rules and advice at a high level of abstraction and concrete solutions and implementations are difficult to perform. As a consequence of this technological immaturity and the lack of documentation, many capabilities in this new field are not exploited. To this end, the authors in this paper propose a first step of providing a framework for performing Model-Driven Pattern Matching operations. Pattern matching based on models is an evolution of a traditional concept adapted to the model realm. In this respect, this kind of pattern matching seems to be promising not only for finding occurrences of given models in others, but also for giving meaning or sense to these patterns in order to undertake actions over the resulting matchings.

MODELING OF AN ANALYTICAL DATABASE SYSTEM

Alex Sandro Romeu de Souza Poletto and Jorge Rady Almeida Junior

This paper describes a modeling for constructing an analytical database, with the objective to store historical values and also the most recent values starting from operational databases. The first function of this modeling is to map operational database into analytical database, using their E-R diagrams. For that, we created ten steps, which will support the mapping. The second function is to make available mechanisms for generation, transport and storage of these historic data. For that, we specified triggers and procedures for each step.

EVIE - AN EVENT BROKERING LANGUAGE FOR THE COMPOSITION OF COLLABORATIVE BUSINESS PROCESSES

Tony O’Hagan, Shazia Sadiq and Wasim Sadiq

Technologies that facilitate the management of collaborative processes are high on the agenda for enterprise software developers. One of the greatest difficulties in this respect is achieving a streamlined pipeline from business modelling to execution infrastructures. In this paper we present Evie - an approach for rapid design and deployment of event driven collaborative processes based on a significant language extensions to Java that are characterized by abstract and succinct constructs. The new language is positioned within an overall framework that provides a bridge between a high level modelling tool and the underlying deployment environment.

INDUCTION OF DATA QUALITY PROTOCOLS INTO BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT

Shazia Sadiq, Maria Orlowska and Wasim Sadiq

Data quality plays a fundamental role in the success of IT solutions deployment. Success of large projects may be compromised due to lack of governance and control of data quality. The criticality of this problem has increased manifold in the current business environment heavily dependent on external data, where such data may pollute enterprise databases. At the same time, it is well recognized that an organization’s business processes provide the backbone for business operations through constituent enterprise applications and services. As such business process management systems are often the first point of contact for dirty data. It is on the basis of this role that we propose that BPM technologies can and should be viewed as a vehicle for data quality enforcement. In this paper, we target a specific data quality problem, namely data mismatch. We propose to address this problem by explicitly inducting requisite data quality protocols in to the business process management system. In addition to presenting the details of the proposed approach, we will also present in this paper, a detailed analysis of process data properties and typical errors.

A DOCUMENT REPOSITORY ARCHITECTURE FOR HETEROGENEOUS BUSINESS INFORMATION MANAGEMENT

Mohamed Mbarki, Chantal Soulé-Dupuy and Nathalie Vallès-Parlangeau

As part of business memories, document repositories should bring some solutions to ensure flexible and efficient uses of dematerialized information content. While the fields of repositories modeling, document integration and information interrogation have independently attracted a huge amount of attention, few works have tried to propose a general architecture of document repository management. Thus we propose a repository architecture based on the integration of different complementary modules ensuring an efficient storage of fragmented digital documents and then flexible fragments exploitation. This paper presents an implementation of such architecture of document repository.

EXTRACTION AND TRANSFORMATION OF DATA FROM SEMI-STRUCTURED TEXT FILES USING A DECLARATIVE APPROACH

R. Raminhos and J. Moura-Pires

The ETL problematic is becoming progressively less specific to the traditional data-warehousing domain and is being extended to the processing of textual data. The World Wide Web appears as a major source of textual information, following a human-readable semi-structured format, referring to multiple domains, some of them highly complex. Traditional ETL approaches following the development of specific source code for each data source and based on multiple domain / computer-science experts interactions, become an inadequate solution, time consuming and prone to error. This paper presents a novel approach to ETL, based on its decomposition in two phases: ETD (Extraction, Transformation and Data Delivery) followed by IL (Integration and Loading). The ETD proposal is supported by a declarative language for expressing ETD statements and a graphical application for interacting with the domain expert. When applying ETD, mainly domain expertise is required, while computer-science expertise will be centred in the IL phase, linking the processed data to target system models, enabling a clearer separation of concerns. This paper also presents how ETD has been integrated, tested and validated in a full data processing solution for a space domain project, currently operational at the European Space Agency for the Galileo Mission.

EXTENSIBLE METADATA REPOSITORY FOR INFORMATION SYSTEMS AND ENTERPRISE APPLICATIONS

Ricardo Ferreira and João Moura-Pires

Today’s Information Systems and Enterprise Applications require extensive use of Metadata information. In Information Systems, metadata helps in integration and modelling their various components and computational processes, while in Enterprises metadata can describe business and management models, human or physical resources, among others. This paper presents a light and no-cost extensible Metadata Repository solution for such cases, relying on XML and related technologies to store, validate, query and transform metadata information, ensuring common operational concerns such as availability and security yet providing easy integration. The feasibility and applicability of the solution is proved by a set of case studies and applications where an implementation is running in operational state.

OLAP AGGREGATION FUNCTION FOR TEXTUAL DATA WAREHOUSE

Franck Ravat, Olivier Teste and Ronan Tournier

For more than a decade, OLAP and multidimensional analysis have generated methodologies, tools and resource management systems for the analysis of numeric data. With the growing availability of semi-structured data there is a need for incorporating text-rich document data in a data warehouse and providing adapted multidimensional analysis. This paper presents a new aggregation function for keywords. The AVG_KW function uses an ontology to join keywords into a more common one. This allows aggregation of textual data in OLAP environment as traditional arithmetic functions would do on numeric data.

DETERMINING THE COSTS OF ERP IMPLEMENTATION

Rob J. Kusters, Fred J. Heemstra and Arjan Jonker

The key question of the research reported here is 'which factors influence En¬terprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation costs'. No sufficient answers to this question can as yet be found in literature. A 'theoretical' answer to this question has been designed by studying the sparsely available literature on ERP implementation costs, and adding to this relevant items from the related fields of software cost estimation, COTS implementation cost estimation, and ERP implementation critical success factors. This result has been compared with empirical data that have been obtained from two large corporations. The combined result can be seen as a first attempt to define a generally applicable list of cost drivers for ERP implementation.

STATISTICS API: DBMS-INDEPENDENT ACCESS AND MANAGEMENT OF DBMS STATISTICS IN HETEROGENEOUS ENVIRONMENTS

Tobias Kraft and Bernhard Mitschang

Many of todays applications access not a single but a multitude of databases running on different DBMSs. Federation technology is being used to integrate these databases and to offer a single query-interface to the user where he can run queries accessing tables stored on different remote databases. So, the optimizer of the federated DBMS has to decide what portion of the query should be processed by the federated DBMS itself and what portion should be executed at the remote systems. Thereto, it has to retrieve cost estimates for query fragments from the remote databases. The response of these databases typically contains cost and cardinality estimates but no statistics about the data stored in these databases. However, statistics are optimization-critical information which is the crucial factor for any kind of decision making in the optimizer of the federated DBMS. When this information is not available optimization has to rely on imprecise heuristics mostly based on default selectivities. To fill this gap, we propose Statistics API, a JAVA interface that provides DBMS-independent access to statistics data stored in databases running on different DBMSs. Statistics API also defines data structures used for the statistics data returned by or passed to the interface. We have implemented this interface for the three prevailing commercial DBMSs IBM DB2, Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server. These implementations will be available under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). This paper introduces the interface, i.e. the methods and data structures of the Statistics API, and discusses some details of the three interface implementations.

DYNAMIC COMMIT TREE MANAGEMENT FOR SERVICE ORIENTED ARCHITECTURES

Stefan Böttcher and Sebastian Obermeier

Whenever Service Oriented Architectures make use of Web service transactions and an atomic processing of these transactions is required, atomic commit protocols are used for this purpose. Compared to traditional client server architectures, atomicity for Web services and Web service composition is much more challenging since in many cases sub-transactions belonging to a global transaction are not known in advance. In this contribution, we present a dynamic commit tree that guarantees atomicity for transactions that invoke sub-transactions dynamically during the commit protocol's execution. Furthermore, our commit tree allows the identification of obsolete sub-transactions that occur if sub-transactions are aborted and restart.

A VIRTUALIZATION APPROACH FOR REUSING MIDDLEWARE ADAPTERS

Ralf Wagner and Bernhard Mitschang

Middleware systems use adapters to integrate remote systems and to provide uniform access to them. Different middleware platforms use different adapter technologies, e.g. the J2EE platform uses J2EE connectors and federated database systems based on the SQL standard use SQL wrappers. However, a middleware platform cannot use adapters of a different middleware platform, e.g. a J2EE application server cannot use an SQL wrapper. Even if an SQL wrapper exists for a remote system that is to be integrated by a J2EE application server, a separate J2EE connector for that remote system has to be written. Tasks like that occur over and over again and require to invest additional resources where existing IT infrastructure should be reused. Therefore, we propose an approach that allows to reuse existing adapters. Reusing adapters is achieved by means of a virtualization tier that can handle adapters of different types and that provides uniform access to them. This enables middleware platforms to use each others adapters and thereby avoids the costly task of writing new adapters.

XML INDEX COMPRESSION BY DTD SUBTRACTION

Stefan Böttcher, Rita Steinmetz and Niklas Klein

Whenever XML is used as data format to exchange large amounts of data or even for data streams, the verbose behaviour of XML is one of the bottlenecks. While compression of XML data seems to be a way out, it is essential for a variety of applications that the compression result still can be queried efficiently. Furthermore, for efficient evaluation of path queries, an index is desired, which usually generates an additional data structure. For this purpose, we have developed a compression technique that uses structure information found in the DTD to perform a structure-preserving compression of XML data and provides a compression of an index that still allows for efficient search in the compressed data. Our evaluation shows that overall compression factors which are close to gzip are possible, whereas the structural part of XML files can be compressed even better.

DISTRIBUTED APPROACH OF CONTINUOUS QUERIES WITH KNN JOIN PROCESSING IN SPATIAL DATA WAREHOUSE

Marcin Gorawski and Wojciech Gębczyk

The paper describes realization of distributed approach to continuous queries with kNN join processing in the spatial telemetric data warehouse. Due to dispersion of developed system, new structural members were distinguished such as the mobile object simulator, the kNN join processing service and query manager. Distributed tasks communicate using JAVA RMI methods. The kNN queries (k Nearest Neighbor) joins every point from one dataset with its k nearest neighbors in the other dataset. In our approach we use the Gorder method, which is a block nested loop join algorithm that exploits sorting, join scheduling and distance computation filtering to reduce CPU and I/O usage.

AN EXTENSIBLE RULE TRANSFORMATION MODEL FOR XQUERY OPTIMIZATION - RULES PATTERN FOR XQUERY TREE GRAPH VIEW

Nicolas Travers and Tuyêt Trâm Dang Ngoc

Efficient evaluation of XML Query Languages has become a crucial issue for XML exchanges and integration. Tree Pattern [1][2][3] are now well admitted for representing XML Queries and a model -called TGV [4][5]- has extended the Tree Pattern representation in order to make it more intuitive, respect full XQuery specification and got support to be manipulated, optimized and then evaluated. For optimization, a search strategy is needed. It consists in generating equivalent execution plan using extensible rules and estimate cost of plan to find the better one. We propose the specification of extensible rules that can be used in heterogeneous environment, supporting XML and manipulating Tree Patterns

AN OVERVIEW OF THE OBJECT-ORIENTED DATABASE PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE DBPQL

Markus Kirchberg

In this paper, we present an integrated object-oriented database programming and querying language. While object-oriented programming languages and languages supported by object-relational or object-oriented database systems appear to be closely related, there are a number of significant differences affecting language design and implementation. Such issues include the degree of encapsulation, persistence, the incooperation types and classes, inheritance, concurrency, NULL values etc. In this paper, we mainly focus on those issues that affect language design.

TOURISM INFORMATION AGGREGATION USING AN ONTOLOGY BASED APPROACH

Miguel Gouveia and Jorge Cardoso

Aggregating related information, from different data sources, allows the creation of data repositories with very useful information. In the tourism domain, aggregating tourism products with related tourism attractions will add value to those products. The ability to create dynamic packages is another reason to aggregate tourism information. Defining an ontology, composed by the concepts to aggregate, is the first step to create tourism aggregation systems. In this paper we define the approach and the architecture that guides to the creation of aggregated solutions that provide valued tourism information and that allow creation of dynamic packages.

ONE-TO-MANY DATA TRANSFORMATION OPERATIONS - OPTIMIZATION AND EXECUTION ON AN RDBMS

Paulo Carreira, Helena Galhardas, João Pereira and Andrzej Wichert

The optimization capabilities of RDBMSs make them attractive for executing data transformations that support ETL, data cleaning and integration activities. However, despite the fact that many useful data transformations can be expressed as relational queries, an important class of data transformations that produces several output tuples for a single input tuple cannot be expressed in that way. To address this limitation a new operator, named data mapper has been proposed as an extension of Relational Algebra for expressing one-to-many data transformations. In this paper we study the feasibility of implementing the mapper operator as a primitive operator on an RDBMS. Data transformations expressed as combinations of standard relational operators and mappers can be optimized resulting in interesting performance gains.

REVISITING THE OLAP INTERACTION TO COPE WITH SPATIAL DATA AND SPATIAL DATA ANALYSIS

Rosa Matias and João Moura-Pires

In this paper we propose a new interface for spatial OLAP systems. Spatial data deals with data related to space and its complex and specific nature brings challenges to OLAP environments. Humans only understand spatial data through maps. Our spatial OLAP environment is compounded of the following elements: a map, a support table and a detail table. Those areas have synchronized granularity. We also extend OLAP operation to performed spatial analysis, for instance, spatial drill-down, spatial roll-up and spatial slice. We take special care in the spatial slice where we identify two main groups of operations: spatial-semantic slice and spatial-geometric slice.

DEVELOPMENT OF AN ACCOUNTING SYSTEM - APPLYING THE INCREMENTALLY MODULAR ABSTRACTION HIERARCHY TO A COMPLEX SYSTEM

Kenji Ohmori and Tosiyasu L. Kunii

The new methodology for software development is introduced and applied to an accounting system. The new method is called the incrementally modular abstraction hierarchy (IMAH). IMAH has an abstraction hierarchy from abstract to concrete levels. Invariants defined on an abstract level are kept on a concrete level, which allows adding modules incrementally on each hierarchical level and avoiding combinatorial explosion of the serious problem in software engineering, while climbing down abstraction hierarchy in designing and modeling a complex system. This paper shows how IMAH is applied in developing an accounting system, which is fundamental in enterprise systems and a suitable example of complex software systems. At first, very simple example recording only journal vouches to a database system is used to describe methodologies of IMAH. Then, it is described how this simple system is incrementally developed to a conventional complex accounting system.

MODELING DIMENSIONS IN THE XDW MODEL - A LVM-DRIVEN APPROACH

R. Rajugan, Elizabeth Chang and Tharam S. Dillon

Since the introduction of eXtensible Markup Language (XML), XML repositories have gained a foothold in many global (and government) organizations, where, e-Commerce and e-Business models have maturated in handling daily transactional data among heterogeneous information systems. Due to this, the amount of data available for enterprise decision-making process is increasing exponentially and are being stored and/or communicated in XML. This presents an interesting challenge to investigate models, frameworks and techniques for organizing and analysing such voluminous, yet distributed XML documents for business intelligence in the form of XML warehouse repositories and XML marts. In our previous work, we proposed a view-driven, conceptual modelling framework for the design and development of an XML Document Warehouse (XDW) model with emphasis on warehouse user requirements. There, we presented a view-driven framework to conceptually model and deploy meaningful XML FACT repositories in the XDW model. Here, in this paper, we look at the hierarchical dimensions and their theoretical semantics used to design, specify and define dimensions over an XML FACT repository in the XDW model. One of the unique properties of this view-driven approach is that the dimensions are considered as first-class citizens of the XDW conceptual model. Also, here, to illustrate our concepts, we use a real-world case study example; a logically grouped, geographically dispersed, XDW model in the context of a global logistics and cold-storage company.

AN INFORMATION SYSTEMS AUDITOR’S PROFILE

Mariana Carroll and Alta van der Merwe

The increasing dependence upon Information Systems (IS) in the last few decades by businesses resulted in many concerns regarding auditing. Traditional IS auditing changed from auditing ‘around the computer’ to auditing through and with the computer. Technology is changing rapidly and so is the profession of IS auditing. As IS auditing is dependent on Information Technology (IT), it is essential that an IS auditor possesses IT and auditing knowledge to bridge the gap between the IT and auditing professions. In this paper we reflect on the auditor’s profile in this changing domain, where we first define the roles and responsibilities expected from IS auditors, describe the basic IT and audit knowledge required from IS auditors based on the roles and responsibilities identified, describe the soft skills required from IS auditors to successfully perform an IS audit assignment, define the main types of IS audit tools and techniques used most often to assist IS auditors in executing IS audit roles and responsibilities and lastly propose the IS auditor’s profile.

ON CORRECTNESS CRITERIA FOR WORKFLOW

Belinda M. Carter and Maria E. Orlowska

Exception handling during the execution of workflow processes is a frequently addressed topic in the literature. Policies describe the desired handling response to exception events in terms of the current state of process execution. In this paper, we present insights into the definition and verification of such policies for handling asynchronous, expected exceptions. In particular, we demonstrate that the definition of exception handling policies is not a trivial exercise in the context of complex processes, and, while different approaches to defining and enforcing exception handling policies have been proposed, the issue of verification of the policies has not yet been addressed. The main contribution of this paper is a set of correctness criteria which we envisage could form the foundation of a complete verification solution for exception handling policies.

PROBLEMS WITH NON-OPEN DATA STANDARDS IN SWEDISH MUNICIPALS: WHEN INTEGRATING AND ADOPTING SYSTEMS

Benneth Christiansson and Fredrik Svensson

Governments world-wide are applying information and communication technology in order to meet a broad range of citizen and organizational needs. When planning systems integration the choice should lead to the software that best suits the organizational needs, taking into account price, quality, ease of use, support, reliability, security and other characteristics considered important. This paper is based on experiences from the KOMpiere project which aims at modifying the open source licensed ERP-system Compiere for use in Swedish municipals. The overall goal of the project is to support and enhance the use of open source licensed software in the Swedish public sector and thereby enable municipals to lower their IT-related costs and gain strategic control over their own IT-environment. We discovered that at least some Swedish municipals don’t have free access to the data they are appointed to govern and protect. The software vendors have, by using non-open data standards, excluded the municipals from using their own data freely. Thereby denying Swedish municipals an open market. We have in this paper suggested the creation and usage of XML-based ODS for all systems in Swedish municipals.

USING AN INDEX OF PRECOMPUTED JOINS IN ORDER TO SPEED UP SPARQL PROCESSING

Sven Groppe, Jinghua Groppe and Volker Linnemann

SparQL is a query language developed by the W3C, the purpose of which is to query a data set in RDF representing a directed graph. Many free available or commercial products already support SparQL processing. Current index-based optimizations integrated in these products typically construct indices on the subject, predicate and object of an RDF triple, which is a single datum of the RDF data, in order to speed up the execution time of SparQL queries. In order to query the directed graph of RDF data, SparQL queries typically contain many joins over a set of triples. We propose to construct and use an index of precomputed joins, where we take advantage of the homogenous structure of RDF data. Furthermore, we present experimental results, which demonstrate the achievable speed-up factors for SparQL processing.

AN EXECUTIVE INFORMATION SYSTEM FOR SECURITIES BROKER’S RISK MANAGEMENT WITH DATA WAREHOUSING AND OLAP

Yung-Hsin Wang, Shing-Han Li and Kuo-Lung Sun

With the open domestic financial market, the targets of investment and money management are toward diversity. The competition from internationalization makes the stock market no more flourishing as usual. The risk of margin trading becomes important information that securities firms try to analyze and get controlled. According to current regulations and working process, this study constructs an executive information system with the application of data warehouse and online analytical processing (OLAP) to help securities brokers make decisions in the operation of risk management for margin purchase and short sale of securities. The result solves the problem that managers of margin trading usually face when using traditional account systems.

CHANGE MANAGEMENT IN DATA INTEGRATION SYSTEMS

Rahee Ghurbhurn, Philippe Beaune and Hugues Solignac

In this paper, we present a flexible architecture allowing applications and functional users to access heterogeneous distributed data sources. Our proposition is based on a multi-agent architecture and a domain knowledge model. The objective of such an architecture is to introduce some flexibility in the information systems architecture. This flexibility can be in terms of the ease to add or remove existing/new applications but also the ease to retrieve knowledge without having to know the underlying data sources structures. We propose to model the domain knowledge with the help of one or several ontologies and to use a multi-agent architecture maintain such a representation and to perform data retrieval tasks. The proposed architecture acts as a single point of entry to existing data sources. We therefore hide the heterogeneity allowing users and applications to retrieve data without being hindered by changes in these data sources.

RELEVANT VALUES: NEW METADATA TO PROVIDE INSIGHT ON ATTRIBUTE VALUES AT SCHEMA LEVEL

Sonia Bergamaschi, Mirko Orsini, Francesco Guerra and Claudio Sartori

Research on data integration has provided languages and systems able to guarantee an integrated intensional representation of a given set of data sources. A significant limitation common to most proposals is that only intensional knowledge is considered, with little or no consideration for extensional knowledge. In this paper we propose a technique to enrich the intension of an attribute with a new sort of metadata: the ``relevant values", extracted from the attribute values. Relevant values enrich schemata with domain knowledge; moreover they can be exploited by a user in the interactive process of creating/refining a query. The technique is automatic, independent of the attribute domain and it is based on data mining clustering techniques and emerging semantics from data values. It is parametrized with various metrics for similarity measures and is a viable tool for dealing with frequently changing sources, as in the Semantic Web context. The technique is fully implemented in a prototype we describe together with some experimental results.

A KOREAN SEARCH PATTERN IN THE LIKE OPERATION

Sung Chul Park, Eun Hyang Lo, Jong Chul Park and Young Chul Park

The string pattern search operator LIKE of SQL has been developed based on English such that each search pattern of English of the operator works for each character in the alphabet of English. For finding Korean, search patterns of the operator can be expressed by both the alphabet and syllables of Korean. As a phonetic symbol, each syllable of Korean is composed either of a leading sound and a medial sound or of a leading sound, a medial sound, and a trailing sound. By utilizing that characteristic of Korean syllables, in addition to the traditional complete-syllable based search pattern of Korean, this paper proposes an incomplete-syllable based search pattern of Korean, as a pattern of the operator LIKE, to find Korean syllables having specific leading sounds, specific medial sounds, or both specific leading sounds and medial sounds. Formulating predicates that are equivalent with the incomplete-syllable based search pattern of Korean by way of existing SQL expressions is cumbersome and might cause the portability problem of applications depending on the underlying character set of the DBMS.

INTEGRATING ENTERPRISE DATA FOR DECISION SUPPORT IN CONSTRUCTION ORGANISATIONS

Tanko Ishaya, James Chadband and Lucy Grierson

Information integration is one of the main problems to be addressed when designing a data warehouse for decision-making support. Possible inconsistencies and redundancies between data residing at the operational data sources needs to be resolved before migrating to a data warehouse, so that the data warehouse is able to provide an integrated and reconciled view of data within the organisation. This paper presents a performance-oriented data warehouse as an integrated data for decision-making support within a construction organisation. The process is based on a conceptual representation of the enterprise, which has been exploited both in the data integration phase of the warehouse information sources and during the decision-making activity from the information stored in the data warehouse. The application of the process has been supported by prototype

A CONTINUOUS DATA INTEGRATION METHODOLOGY FOR SUPPORTING REAL-TIME DATA WAREHOUSING

Ricardo Jorge Santos and Jorge Bernardino

A data warehouse provides information for analytical processing, decision making and data mining tools. As the concept of real-time enterprise evolves, the synchronism between transactional data and data warehouses, statically implemented, has been reviewed. Traditional data warehouse systems have static structures of their schemas and relationships between data, and therefore are not able to support any dynamics in their structure and content. Their data is only periodically updated because they are not prepared for continuous data integration. For these purposes, real-time data warehouses seem to be very promising. In this paper we present a methodology on how to adapt data warehouse schemas and user-end OLAP (On-Line Analytical Processing) queries for efficiently supporting real-time data integration. To accomplish this, we use techniques such as table structure replication and query predicate restrictions for selecting data, managing to enable continuous data integration in the data warehouse with minimum impact in query execution time. We demonstrate the functionality of the method by analyzing its impact in query performance using benchmark TPC-H executing query workloads while simultaneously performing continuous data integration at various insertion time rates.

ACTIVITY WAREHOUSE: DATA MANAGEMENT FOR BUSINESS ACTIVITY MONITORING

Oscar Mangisengi, Mario Pichler, Dagmar Auer, Dirk Draheim and Hildegard Rumetshofer

Nowadays tracking data from the checkpoints of business process activities of transactions becomes important data resource for business analyst and decision-makers to support tactical decisions in general and strategic decisions in particular. In the context of business process-oriented applications, business activity monitoring (BAM) systems predicted as a major role in the near future of the business-intelligence area is the most visible use of the current business needs. In this paper we address an approach to derive an activity warehouse model based on the BAM requirements. The implementation shows that data stored in activity warehouse is able to efficiently monitor the business process in real-time and provide a better real-time visibility of the business process.

LEGACY SYSTEM EVOLUTION – A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF MODERNISATION AND REPLACEMENT INITIATION FACTORS

Irja Kankaanpää, Päivi Tiihonen, Jarmo J. Ahonen, Jussi Koskinen, Tero Tilus and Henna Sivula

Decisions regarding information system evolution strategy become topical as the organisation’s information systems age and start to approach the end of their life cycle. An interview study was conducted in order to compare factors influencing modernisation and replacement initiation. The results show that the most prevalent individual reason for modernisation initiative is business development, while the most typical reason for system replacement is the old age of the existing system. System age, obsolete technology and high operation or maintenance costs, were identified in both modernisation and replacement projects. Other common initiation criteria for replacement projects were end of vendor support and system’s inability to respond to company’s business needs. Typically, modernisation projects were initiated because of a system’s old age and obsolete technology.

STRATEGIC FRAMEWORK TO IMPLEMENT A TELECOMMUNICATIONS BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE SOLUTION IN A DEVELOPING COUNTRY

D. P. du Plessis and T. McDonald

After privatisation a telecommunications company, who had exclusive rights, had to prepare itself for competition. It was of the utmost importance for the company to improve its business while there was still little competition and in so doing create a competitive advantage. A new business intelligence strategy was therefore required. A framework was developed to implement the company’s business intelligence strategy. The framework consisted of the steps that had to be followed to grow business intelligence and data warehousing in the company. These steps were supported by two modules, the data warehousing lifecycle model and the business intelligence literacy and cultural maturity model that formed part of the framework. All the components of the framework are discussed in detail.

TOWARDS INDUSTRIAL SERVICE BUSINESS: CHALLENGES IN DESIGNING ICT SUPPORT FOR THE NETWORKS OF COMPANIES

Sauli Hiippavuori, Markus Hänninen, Samuli Pekkola and Kari Luostarinen

Currently traditional manufacturing business is changing its shape and becoming a service industry. In addi-tion to products, manufacturers are also providing specialized knowledge-based services. This transforma-tion is not easy as both the manufacturers and their customers have to learn new ways of doing business to-gether. Although ICT can be perceived as an enabler for such operations, its support for the activities of the networks of companies is still more or less unknown. In these settings, ICT-related challenges are multifold in comparison to traditional intra-organizational domains. In this paper, we present our findings from a case study on constructing ICT support for industrial service business. We provide a list, derived from a study of synchronizing two organizations and their factory-floor level operations, of technological challenges to con-sider when designing and implementing systems to support daily business operations of industrial service business.

SOFTWARE COST ESTIMATION USING ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORKS WITH INPUTS SELECTION

Efi Papatheocharous and Andreas Andreou

Software development is an intractable, multifaceted process encountering deep, inherent difficulties. Especially when trying to produce accurate and reliable software cost estimates, these difficulties are amplified due to the high level of complexity and uniqueness of the software process. This paper addresses the issue of estimating the cost of software development by identifying the need for countable entities that affect software cost and using them with artificial neural networks to establish a reliable estimation method. Input Sensitivity Analysis (ISA) is performed on predictive models of the Desharnais and ISBSG datasets aiming at identifying any correlation present between important cost parameters at the input level and development effort (output). The degree to which the input parameters define the evolution of effort is then investigated and the selected attributes are employed to establish accurate prediction of software cost in the early phases of the software development life-cycle.

DQXSD: AN XML SCHEMA FOR DATA QUALITY - AN XSD FOR SUPPORTING DATA QUALITY IN XML

Eugenio Verbo, Ismael Caballero and Mario Piattini

Traditionally, data quality management has mainly focused on both data source and data target. Increasingly, data processing to get a data product need raw data typically distributed among different data sources. However, if data quality is not preserved when transmitted, resulting data product and consequent information will not be of much value. It is necessary to improve exchange methods to get a better information process. This paper focus on that issue, proposing a new approach for data quality. Using XML and related technologies, a document structure that considers quality as a main topic is defined. The resulting schema is verified using several measures and comparing it to the data source.

MULTIDIMENSIONAL VECTOR ROUTING IN A P2P NETWORK

Laurent Yeh, Georges Gardarin and Florin Dragan

P2P systems tend to be largely accepted as a common support for deploying massively distributed data management applications. Many multidimensional data P2P indexing techniques suffer from severe limitations regarding the number of data dimensions to be indexed. In this paper, we propose a new approach for indexing multidimensional data in a P2P architecture. It is based on an efficient query overlay network (the so-called routing layer) built from a new data structure named skip-zone. We index data pieces of large dimensions as vectors and we adopt the polyhedral algebra for splitting the domain of possible values into sub-domains. Every peer controls a sub-domain of values. To manage the overlay network meta-data required for tracking the network evolution or for routing data at each peer, we propose an efficient distributed meta-data layer that works in cooperation with the routing layer. An evaluation outlines the main properties of our architecture versus those of similar systems. The insensibility of the vector dimension in our data model is a key advantage of our approach.

EXPOSING WORKFLOWS TO LOAD BURSTS

Dmytro Dyachuk and Ralph Deters

Well defined, loosely coupled services are the basic building blocks of the service-orientated design-integration paradigm. Services are computational elements that expose functionality (e.g. legacy applications) in a platform independent manner and can be described, published, discovered, orchestrated and consumed across language, platform and organizational borders. Using service-orientation (SO) it is fairly easy to expose existing applications/resources and to aggregate them into novel services called composite services (CS). This aggregation is achieved by defining a workflow that orchestrates the underlying services in a manner consistent with the desired functionality. Since CS can aggregate atomic and other CS they foster the development of service layers and reuse of already existing functionality. But by defining workflows, existing services are put into novel contexts and exposed to different workloads, which in turn can result in unexpected behaviours. This paper examines the behaviour of sequential workflows that experience short-lived load bursts. Using workflows of varying length, the paper reports on the transformations that loads experience as they are processed by providers.

ENABLING CSCW SYSTEMS TO AUTOMATICALLY BIND EXTERNAL KNOWLEDGE BASES

Thomas Bopp, Jonas Schulte and Thorsten Hampel

The usage of CSCW systems for teaching, training, and research collaboration increases since they offer a time- and place-independent as well as a cost-effective platform. The user’s search should not be restricted to local material; in fact users benefit from different search environments like for example digital libraries to find appropriate working material. Searching and further processing of documents imply a media breach since the search cannot be invoked in current CSCW systems directly. This paper presents the first prototype of a CSCW system which enables users to search in external sources without media breach. To provide arbitrary search environments no restrictions to data formats or search functionalities are allowed. Hence we have enhanced search environments with self description capabilities in order to realize an automatic binding of search environments in CSCW systems. By search environments we address any system offering searchable knowledge bases, such as digital libraries or the CSCW system itself. Furthermore our concept supports local search and searching in different external sources in parallel.

DOING THINGS RIGHT OR DOING THE RIGHT THINGS? PROPOSING A DOCUMENTATION SCHEME FOR SMALL TO MEDIUM ENTERPRISES

Josephine Antoniou, Panagiotis Germanakos and Andreas S. Andreou

Coping with the initial and finest systems’ functionality and performance is indeed one of the major problems nowadays, due to the rapid increase and continuous change of customer demands. Hence, it is crucial to move on with a research analysis in an attempt to identify whether documentation, the most reliable source for preserving a software system’s quality over the years, is properly created, updated and used in Small to Medium Enterprises (SME) operating in small EU markets, focusing both on the development process and the maintenance activities. Henceforth, the main objective of this paper is to propose a minimum documentation set required to fulfil both the Software Engineering principles and the SME practical needs by comparing literature suggestions with empirical findings. In further support of our documentation set suggestion, we present and discuss the results of a small survey conducted in nine IT-oriented SME in Cyprus and Greece.

OOPUS - A PRODUCTION PLANNING INFORMATION SYSTEM TO ASSURE HIGH DELIVERY RELIABILITY UNDER SHORT-TERM DEMAND CHANGES AND PRODUCTION DISTURBANCES

Wilhelm Dangelmaier, Tobias Rust, Thomas Hermanowski, Daniel Brüggemann, Daniel Kaschula, Andre Döring and Thorsten Timm

Batch-sizing and scheduling is the central decision problem in the area of production planning. A special challenge in this context is to handle the big amount of data in an adequate time interval. To aggregate and to illustrate this data clearly, appropriate techniques are required. This paper presents a new approach to integrate a Production Planning Table visualized by a Gantt chart and a cumulative quantity table for maximum information transparency in production planning. The discussed solution is realized in OOPUS, an object-oriented tool for planning and control, which became the leading production planning system in two motor assembly plants of an international automobile manufacturer.

MANAGING COMPLEX INFORMATION IN REACTIVE APPLICATIONS USING AN ACTIVE TEMPORAL XML DATABASE APPROACH

Essam Mansour, Kudakwashe Dube and Bing Wu

Some tasks in application domains, such as patient care practice, require constant monitoring of a dynamic context and environment based on best practice in the form of predefined evidence- or experience-based information or knowledge. In the most basic scenario, these applications take the form of reactive and active applications. Incorporating best practice into routines used in such domain applications is a challenging problem that requires dedicated approaches and methods for comprehensively managing complex information that is associated with these domains. This paper presents a generic framework for Complex Information Management (CIM) in domains where best practice applied to changing circumstances need to be incorporated into day-to-day work. The approach adopted uses the combined application of the event-condition-action (ECA) rule paradigm, a temporal mechanism, advanced DBMS features and XML technologies facilitating the support for the three key complex information management dimensions of specification, execution, and manipulation (dissemination, query and maintenance) of the complex domain information. The uniqueness of the work presented in this paper lie in supporting the multiple management dimensions for managing information under a single unified framework. The main contribution of our framework is in managing the reactive application logic within the specification and execution dimension as one object that is easy to be manipulated, queried, and disseminated within the manipulation dimension. The benefits of our approach include: the flexibility of managing the complex information as one document, and the easy incorporation of the complex information management system into other systems.

USING FUZZY DATACUBES IN THE STUDY OF TRADING STRATEGIES

M. Delgado Calvo-Flores, J. F. Nuñez Negrillo, E. Gibaja Galindo and C. Molina Fernández

A fuzzy multidimensional model can be used for exploratory analysis, modelling complex concepts that are very difficult to use in crisp ones. Some problems, as the edge problem, can be reduced using this approach. To hide the complexity of the fuzzy logic in this situation is important. In this paper we present an application of a fuzzy multidimensional model, that uses two layer representation to hide the complexity to the user, in the study of trading strategies.

ORGANIZATIONAL ISSUES ON COOPETITIVE FEDERATED INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Mirko Cesarini and Mario Mezzanzanica

In this paper we point out the organizational issues related to the set-up of an information systems federation based on a coopetitive behavior. The joint exploitation of information owned by different, independent, even competing entities may be carried out according to a "coopetitive model". The term coopetition is used in management literature to refer to a hybrid behavior comprising competition and cooperation. We will show in this paper that the set-up of a coopetitive cenario raises organizational issues, which can be addressed by the creation of inter-firm personal relationships as well as by the firms decision makers active engagement.

ON THE SEMI-AUTOMATIC VALIDATION AND DECOMPOSITION OF TERNARY RELATIONSHIPS WITH OPTIONAL ELEMENTS

Ignacio-J. Santos, Paloma Martínez Fernandez and Dolores Cuadra

This paper analyzes the problems that concern the design of databases. CASE tools supply a resources kit for the design and creation of database in a DBMS (Database Management System). Sometimes, these tools only help to draw diagrams. Ideally, they would verify and validate DB design and transform it from Conceptual to Logical Model. In a last step, they would transform the Logical Model to a specific DBMS. Currently, commercial tools do not verify or validate the model in an optimal way. This paper is focused on the validation and checking of database schemas. This work specially analyzes the ternary or higher-order relationships when there are optional components.

STAH-TREE: HYBRID INDEX FOR SPATIO TEMPORAL AGGREGATION

Marcin Gorawski, and Michał Faruga

This paper presents new index that stores spatiotemporal data and provides efficient algorithms for processing range and time aggregation queries where results are precise values not an approximation. In addition, this technology allows to reach detailed information when they are required. Spatiotemporal data are defined as static spatial objects with non spatial attributes changing in time. Range aggregation query computes aggregation over set of spatial objects that fall into query window. Its temporal extension allows to define additional time constraints. Index name (i.e. STAH-tree) is English abbreviation and can be extended as Spatio-Temporal Aggregation Hybrid Tree. STAH-tree is based on two well known indexing techniques. R– and aR–tree for storing spatial data and MVB-tree for storing non-spatial attributes values. These techniques were extended with new functionality and adopted to work together. Cost model for node accesses was also developed.

USING SEMANTIC WEB AND SERVICE ORIENTED TECHNOLOGIES TO BUILD LOOSELY COUPLED SYSTEMS: SWOAT – A SERVICE AND SEMANTIC WEB ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE TECHNOLOGY

Bruno Caires and Jorge Cardoso

The creation of loosely coupled and flexible applications has been a challenge faced by most organizations. This has been important because organization systems need to quickly respond and adapt to changes that occur in the business environment. In order to address these key issues, we implemented SWOAT, a ‘Service and Semantic Web Oriented Architecture Technology’ based middleware. Our system uses ontologies to semantically describe and formalize the information model of the organization, providing a global and integrated view over a set of database systems. It also allows interoperability with several systems using Web Services. Using ontologies and Web services, clients remain loosely coupled from data sources. As a result, data structures can be changed and moved without having to change all clients, internal or external to the organization.

A MULTI-VIEWS REPOSITORY FOR MULTI-STRUCTURED DOCUMENTS

Karim Djemal

The diversity of use of numerical documents has created new interests on archiving, storing and accessing the numerical documents. A lot of work has been done in this perspective. This paper presents a way of treating the multi-structured documents within repositories. The use of the views is a way of managing these documents. The meta-model proposed allows a better representation of the documents through the modelling of the elements, metadata and the relations that connect them. It proposes a better management of storage space for the views storage through their overlapping also

USABILITY ISSUES IN SERVICE-ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE

Jaroslav Král and Michal Zemlicka