SGER Collaborative Research: Support for Design of Evolving Information Systems

设计信息系统的一个长期问题是如何使它们能够应对不断的发展。这个问题表现在许多环境中，包括软件管理、配置管理和网页演变。这个问题尤其重要，因为信息系统的设计(或重新设计)是以Web为中心(通常是基于XML的)。该项目的目标是扩展数据库技术，以便更好地支持设计和开发能够优雅地适应变化的信息系统。因此，数据库系统必须扩展为：(I)有效地管理和查询时态/历史信息；(Ii)支持对数据集和软件制品的版本控制；(Iii)统一管理数据和元数据，并将配置管理的问题减少为时态查询和版本检索的问题。针对这一具有挑战性的问题提出的方法利用了XML统一数据和元数据的能力，并支持强大的查询语言。因此，信息系统的发展--它们的数据、元数据和软件构件--由带有时间戳的XML文档统一和建模。该项目将测试将在试点研究中测试的新定义的能力，在该研究中，现有的简历管理和工作安排信息系统将重新设计以适应发展。基于过去和计划的更改的实验用于验证项目中开发的解决方案的有效性。这些将为设计进化和可维护性的信息系统铺平道路。结果将通过项目网站(http://wis.cs.ucla.edu/nsf-projects/science-of-design，http://www.cs.ucr.edu/~tsotras/design.html).提供的出版物、报告和演示进行传播

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 modeled 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).