SGER Collaborative Research: Support for Design of Evolving Information Systems

设计信息系统的一个长期问题是使它们能够科普持续的演变。这个问题在许多设置中表现出来，包括软件管理，配置管理和网页演变。当信息系统正在以Web为中心（通常是基于XML）进行设计（或重新设计）时，这个问题就显得尤为重要。本项目的目标是扩展数据库技术，以更好地支持设计和开发能够灵活适应变化的信息系统。因此，数据库系统必须扩展的能力（i）管理和查询有效的时间/历史信息，（ii）支持版本控制的数据集和软件工件，和（iii）统一管理的数据和元数据，并减少配置管理的问题的时间查询和版本检索。 针对这个具有挑战性的问题提出的方法利用XML的能力来统一数据和元数据，并支持强大的查询语言。因此，信息系统的发展--它们的数据、元数据和软件工件--通过带时间戳的XML文档统一和建模。该项目将测试新界定的能力，这些能力将在一项试点研究中进行测试，其中将重新设计现有的简历管理和工作安排信息系统，以便逐步发展。实验的基础上，过去和计划的变化，用于验证项目中开发的解决方案的有效性。这些将为信息系统的进化和可维护性设计铺平道路。将通过项目网站（http：//wis.cs.ucla.edu/nsf-projects/science-of-design，http：//www.cs.ucr.edu/nsf-sotras/design.html）上的出版物、报告和演示来传播成果。

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).