This paper presents a requirements analysis and a solution approach to representing collaborative business processes conforming to the Wf-XML/ASAP standard proposal in a UDDI registry. Wf-XML/ASAP is introduced as a coordination protocol for business collaborations focusing on loosely coupled subprocesses which involve executable and human activities. The UDDI standard as part of the web services protocol stack is designed to hold service relevant information from overall business entities down to technical fingerprints of mostly simple web services. We present a solution approach that allows to use UDDI for registering and discovering services using Wf-XML/ASAP interfaces. We conclude that while such a representation is possible, some of UDDI's structures and relationships need to be extended in order to get an appropriate service registry for interoperable services collaborative infrastructures.

Abstract: Tamino is Software AG's XML database management system. In contrast to solutions of other DBMS vendors, Tamino is not just another layer on top of a database system designed to support the relational or an object-oriented data model. Rather, Tamino has been completely designed for XML. This paper gives a short overview of Tamino's architecture and then addresses some of the design considerations for Tamino. In particular, areas are presented where database design for XML was nontrivial, and where some issues are still open.

'Computer-Supported Cooperative Work' is a young research area considering applications with strong demands on database technology. Design applications need support for cooperation and some means for controlling their inherent dynamics. However, today's CAD systems consisting of a collection of diverse design tools typically do not support these requirements. Therefore, an encompassing processing model is needed that covers the overall design process in general as well as CAD-tool application in particular. The CONCORD model described in the paper, reflects the distinct properties of design process dynamics by distinguishing three levels of abstraction. The highest level supports application-specific cooperation control and design process administration, the second considers goal-oriented tool invocation and work-flow management while the third level provides tool processing of design data. To achieve level-spanning control, the authors rely on transactional facilities provided at the various system layers.>

The authors present a version model for CAD purposes and its implementation on the basis of a complex-object database management system. The functionality of the model is illustrated with the help of a VLSI design example. In contrast to similar solutions based on the relational data model, this approach allows for a simple and efficient implementation of the version model, allowing for powerful retrieval operations. Sharing of data, which occurs necessarily among versions, is system controlled. This prohibits redundant storage of data. It is concluded that implementing a complex-object database system supporting versions is not more complicated than implementing a complex-object database system without version support.>

PRIMA is a non-standard database system developed at the University Kaiserslautern. Its major purpose is the support of engineering design applications, such as VLSI design and software engineering. The applications require tailored application-dependent interfaces which, however, all share basic notions like that of a composite object. Hence, the approach of PRIMA is to offer an application-independent complex-object interface (the moleculeatom data model, shortly called MAD model) and to provide means to easily augment this interface by application-dependent functionality. In the following, we will concentrate on the MAD model and its implementation.

Support for temporal data continues to be a requirement posed by many applications such as VLSI design and CAD, but also in conventional applications like banking and sales. Furthermore, the strong demand for complex-object support is known as an inherent fact in design applications, and also emerges for advance “conventional” applications. Thus, new advanced database management systems should include both features, i.e. should support temporal complex-objects. In this paper, we present such a temporal complex-object data model. The central notion of our temporal complex-object data model is a time slice, representing one state of a complex object. We explain the mapping of time slices onto the complex objects supported by the MAD model (which we use for an example of a non-temporal complex-object data model) as well as the transformation process of operations on temporal complex-objects into MAD model operations. Thereby, the basic properties of the MAD model are a prerequisite for our approach. For example, time slices can only be directly stored, if non-disjunct (i.e. over-lapping) complex objects are easily handled in the underlying complex-object data model.