Ontologies are increasingly used to represent the intended real-world semantics of data and services in information systems. Unfortunately, different data sources often do not relate to the same ontologies when describing their semantics. Consequently, it is desirable to have information about the similarity between ontology concepts for ontology alignment and integration. In this demo, we present the SOQA-SimPack Toolkit (SST), an ontology language independent Java API that enables generic similarity detection and visualization in ontologies. We demonstrate SST's usefulness with the SOQA-SimPack Toolkit Browser that allows users to graphically perform similarity calculations in ontologies.

Integrated engineering environments, based on federated database technology, are, among others, a means to control the integrity of and dependencies between product data created in many different engineering applications. Most of these applications support the management of versions of a product and its parts, continuing the engineers' tradition of keeping different versions of drawings and documents. Consequently, federations in engineering environments have to provide version management on their global layer as well. The paper discusses the concepts for a flexible and customisable realisation of the federated database management system's version propagation service. This service is responsible for making a new local version "visible" at the global layer of the federation and vice versa. It tries to identify properties like a new version's history and predecessor automatically. We show how these properties can (and sometimes must) be completed or updated if they are incomplete, inapplicable, or even contradictory. We conclude that the customisation overhead is inevitable for any general solution bridging highly heterogeneous versioning models.

Capturing, representing and processing metadata promises to facilitate the management, consistent use and understanding of data and thus better support the exploitation of masses of information that is available online today. Despite the increasing interest in metadata management, its purpose, requirements and problems are still not clear. This is particularly true in the area of data warehousing. The reasons are multiple. Compared to the past, today's metadata management considers a significantly larger spectrum of information (including even certain pieces of programs). Moreover, metadata are produced by various tools and reside in different sources which need to be integrated in order to ensure consistency and provide uniform access, impact analysis and data tracking. Existing work has only partially covered some of these aspects. The paper summarizes the most important issues of metadata management for data warehousing, including the role of metadata and solved and unsolved problems of the available solutions. The design of an appropriate information model, metadata integration and advanced user interaction facilities are crucial questions to be answered.

Data available on-line toda y is spread over heterogeneous data sources like traditional databases or sources of various forms containing unstructured and semistructured data.Obviously , the \tec hnical" a vailabilit y alone is not at all sufcien t for making meaningful use of the existing information, and thus the problem of eectively and eÆciently accessing and querying heterogeneous data is an important research issue.One main approach i s t o i n tegrate the data sources and oer users an a priori de ned global schema.Alternatively, there are approaches which implement tools for giving users the possibility to de ne the global schema themselves.We propose a new approach where heterogeneous sources can be queried through a uni ed interface and underlying sources are in tegrated b y means of a query language only .In this paper, we presen t extensions to OQL whic h allo w to query structurally heterogeneous data, i.e. structured, semistructured and unstructured data alik e, and to integrate data on-the-y.We also deal with issues of the extensive meta information about sources that is needed for integration.

The distribution of data within or between organizations is crucial for many applications.Such a distribution may be transparent, as it is embodied in distributed database systems to increase their performance, reliability and availability.Other systems either do not require transparent data distribution or even explicitly need their own copies of the data.Examples are data warehouses which collect base data from different transaction processing systems, or financial data distribution systems in banking where data are bought from external providers and distributed to different working groups.Such systems need non-transparent, partial and selective replication of databases.If object databases are used, appropriate replication systems have to cope with the additional complexity of object models.TodayÕs replication systems do not meet these requirements.Consequently, we introduce a meta model that specifies the abstract functionality which is needed for the non-transparent, partial and selective replication of object databases.This meta model allows incorporation of its replication concepts in a variety of object models.In addition, we present the design of a replication infrastructure, based on the meta model, which serves as the foundation for concrete realizations of object replication systems.The development of a replication system for a time series database management system proved the viability of the proposed solution.

Article Free Access Share on FRAMBOISE—an approach to framework-based active database management system construction Authors: Hans Fritschi Database Technology Reaearch Group, Institut für Informatik, Universität Universität Zürich Database Technology Reaearch Group, Institut für Informatik, Universität Universität ZürichView Profile , Stella Gatziu Database Technology Reaearch Group, Institut für Informatik, Universität Universität Zürich Database Technology Reaearch Group, Institut für Informatik, Universität Universität ZürichView Profile , Klaus R. Dittrich Database Technology Reaearch Group, Institut für Informatik, Universität Universität Zürich Database Technology Reaearch Group, Institut für Informatik, Universität Universität ZürichView Profile Authors Info & Claims CIKM '98: Proceedings of the seventh international conference on Information and knowledge managementNovember 1998 Pages 364–370https://doi.org/10.1145/288627.288678Online:01 November 1998Publication History 11citation283DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations11Total Downloads283Last 12 Months13Last 6 weeks7 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF

In last year’s ICDE panel in New Orleans [l], we examined the question of whether database research is able to provide leadership to database industries. There was a consensus that with the maturing of the field, we should now focus on new areas where we can leverage off our rich experience in database research. The question of what problem to work on next has always been a difficult one to answer and we suspect that it will not get easier. Even then, it will be rewarding to examine the question of how the successful and not so successful threads of research came into being and what caught our fancy and why. Specifically, we will seek the perspective of the panelists on the following questions:

Summary form only given. Active database management systems (active DBMS) support the definition, management and execution of event/condition/action rules specifying reactive application behavior. Although the advantages of active mechanisms are nowadays well known, there is still no wide use in practice. One main problem is that especially for large rule sets, defined by different persons at different points in time, potential conflicts and dependencies between rules are hard to predict and rule behavior is difficult to control. Therefore, tools are needed to assist the development and maintenance of rule bases. These tools should provide for graphical interfaces supporting both, "static" activities (performed during rule specification) such as rule editing, browsing, design, rule analysis, and "dynamic" activities (performed at runtime, during the execution of an application) such as testing, debugging and understanding of rule behavior. The aim of the article is to show the use of three of these tools, namely the rule editor, the browser and the termination analyzer in the process of developing applications for the active object oriented DBMS SAMOS.

No abstract available.

Interest in database support for scientific information management has been considerably growing in the recent past. We look into one specific scientific area, i.e. molecular biology. The analysis of the current molecular biology working environment consisting of various independent software components shows several shortcomings and thus leads to requirements for an integrated working environment. We propose an architecture for an integrated system, the centre of which is a federated database system, the data repository. Its main benefits are a central data administration, a uniform data representation, the possibility of data reuse, and ad hoc query facilities. In addition, new application tools can be implemented on top of the repository easily and thus much faster than today.>

Designers in CAD environments typically perform long-duration modifications of completely structure objects and work cooperatively in design teams. Several forms of design transactions for nonstandard database systems have been proposed as a mechanism to support their kind of operational pattern. They are partitioned by checkout/check-in operations and/or divided into several kinds of subtransactions, both used within concurrency control algorithms which are less strict than those in classical systems. However, these models tend to lead to rather complex transaction structures that are unwieldy to use and thus difficult to exploit to their full advantage. Mechanisms, like those incorporated in the DAMOK-LES database system, which try to overcome this disadvantage, are presented. They allow designers to share work by checking out one complex design object concurrently and modifying different parts of it.>

In engineering applications, multiple copies of object descriptions have to coexist in a single database. A scheme is proposed that enables users to explicitly deal with these object versions. After introducing a basic version model, the problem of rerouting interobject references on the creation of new versions is solved by providing generic references and user-specific environments. Logical version clusters are introduced that allow for the meaningful grouping of versions. Some remarks on implementation and a comparison with other approaches are also included.>

Database systems for engineering applications must be particularly efficient in storing and retrieving very complex structures. But they must also be capable of assisting in the project-oriented cooperation of design engineers by supporting the controlled exchange of stored information. The latter aspect has not been given much emphasis in the past; and the few proposals found in the literature all deal with extending the database system's transaction concept. This paper presents an alternative approach that is orthogonal to transactions and thus is much simpler to understand and to implement.

Present protection mechanisms in operating Systems are usually dedicated to provide reliability within the operating system. This paper presents a design that can be used to solve basic information protection problems by means of the operating system as well. It is based on a uniform system structuring unit, called a subsystem, and allows rather fine grain protection strategies to be reallzed. Further differences to other approaches lie in the notion of subject used and in the very detailed form privileges can be granted. The paper introduces the basic concepts, sketches on some implementation aspects and discusses the consequences of the approach. The ideas are currently implemented as part of the OSKAR operating system project.