III-COR: Collaborative Research: Graceful Evolution and Historical Queries in Information Systems -- a Unified Approach

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III-COR: Collaborative Research: Graceful Evolution and HistoricalQueries in Information Systems-- a Unified ApproachDatabase schema evolution is a constant in the life-cycle ofInformation Systems (IS), and a source of major costs for maintenance,upgrading, and service down time. The traditional process ofinstalling a new schema, converting the database, and rewritingapplications is slow and laborious. Instead, this project developsthe novel technology whereby the schema evolution problem isreduced to coordinating mappings between multiple concurrentversions of schema, applications, and database. The project'sapproach consists of developing: (i) XML-based architectures forunifying the management of evolving data and metadata, (ii)methods for capturing evolution via schema mappings, (iii)efficient mapping techniques for queries and applications. Theseadvances will enable the development of the MetaManager, a systemthat supports: (a) preserving and querying database histories, and(b) better planning on how-to evolve current schema versions, viaevaluation and testing of ``what-if'' scenarios. Itsfunctionality and performance are validated using various testbeds,including the SDSC Storage Request Broker, which hosts scientificdata for research groups ranging from astrophysicists tobiologists.This novel and timely approach provides a solution to both theevolution and preservation of IS. Because of thekey role played by IS, a broad range of scientific, educational,and economic activities will benefit. Project funds supporttraining of PhD students while undergraduate research interns aretrained on schema-evolution scenarios using the MetaManager. Thetechnology is a part of database design courses. Results aredisseminated via publications, reports and demos which are available from:http://www.cs.ucr.edu/~tsotras/meta-managerhttp://wis.cs.ucla.edu/projects/meta-managerhttp://db.ucsd.edu/people/alin/meta-manager