Principal
Investigators Carlo Zaniolo
<zaniolo@cs.ucla.edu>
Vassilis Tsotras <tsotras@cs.ucr.edu>
Abstract
A perennial problem in designing information systems is enabling
them to cope with continuous evolution. This problem manifests
itself in many settings, including software management,
configuration management and web-page evolution. The problem is
particularly important as information systems are being designed (or
re-designed) with a web-centered (typically XML-based) focus.
The objective of this project is to extend database technology to
better support the design and development of information systems
that gracefully adapt to changes. Therefore, database systems must
be extended with the ability to (i) manage and query efficiently
temporal/historical information, (ii) support version control for
data sets, and software artifacts, and (iii) unify management of
data and metadata and reduce the problem of configuration management
to that of temporal querying and version retrieval.
The approach proposed to this challenging problem exploits XML
ability to unify data and metadata and support powerful query
languages. The evolution of information systems---their data,
metadata, and software artifacts--- is thus unified and modelled by
time-stamped XML documents. The project will test the newly defined
capabilities to be tested in a pilot study,where an existing
information system for resume management and job placement are
re-designed for evolution. Experiments based on past and planned
changes, are used to validate the effectiveness of the solutions
developed in the project. These will pave the way to designing
information systems for evolution and maintainability. Results will
be disseminated via publications, reports and demos available from
the project web sites:
http://wis.cs.ucla.edu/nsf-projects/science-of-design
http://www.cs.ucr.edu/~tsotras/design.html
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