SGER Collaborative Research: Support for Design of Evolving Information Systems

设计信息系统的一个长期存在的问题是使它们能够应对不断的演变。这个问题在许多设置中都有体现，包括软件管理、配置管理和网页演变。当信息系统以 Web 为中心（通常基于 XML）进行设计（或重新设计）时，这个问题就显得尤为重要。该项目的目标是扩展数据库技术，以更好地支持能够优雅地适应变化的信息系统的设计和开发。因此，数据库系统必须具有以下能力：（i）有效管理和查询时间/历史信息，（ii）支持数据集和软件工件的版本控制，以及（iii）统一数据和元数据的管理，并将配置管理问题减少到时间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 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，信息系统的演变（它们的数据、元数据和软件工件）是通过带有时间戳的 XML 文档来统一和建模的。该项目将测试新定义的功能，以在试点研究中进行测试，其中用于简历管理和工作安置的现有信息系统将被重新设计以进行演进。基于过去和计划的变更的实验用于验证项目中开发的解决方案的有效性。这些将为设计信息系统的演进性和可维护性铺平道路。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）上的出版物、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).