Project Reporting ANNUAL REPORT FOR AWARD # 9796264

Elke A Rundensteiner ; Worcester Polytech Inst
NYI: Object-Oriented Database Tools for Supporting Complex Evolutionary Software Systems

Participant Individuals:
Graduate student(s) : Kajal T Claypool; Andreas Koeller
Undergraduate student(s) : Amber Van Wyk; Keiji Oenoki; Yvonne E Stone
Graduate student(s) : Xin Zhang; Songting Chen
Undergraduate student(s) : Brian Murphy
Graduate student(s) : Hong Su

Partner Organizations:
Excelon Inc.: In-kind Support

provided software and even development of software patches for

enabling the development of SERF system.

also, we had several interactions in the form of on-site meetings to

establish colloborative efforts.

IBM: Financial Support; Collaborative Research
IBM has provided corporate IBM fellowship to support one of my

graduate student to work on issues related to the NSF project.

One graduate student has typically gone to IBM for the summer as

intern to work on said research efforts.

Verizon Labs: Financial Support; Collaborative Research; Personnel Exchanges
Mainly, we had collaborations with Dr. Gail Mitchell and Dr.

Wang-chien Lee, both at Verizon labs. They funded one of the Ph.d

students

Xin Zhang in our research group via a year-long internship, allowing

him to make contributions in the area of XML to relational mapping and

view management. Several joint publications have resulted from this

collaboration.

HP Labs: Financial Support; Collaborative Research; Personnel Exchanges
We had collaborations with Dr. Harumi Kuno, employee at HP Labs in

California site the E-services group. HP supported one of my Ph.d.

students here, Hong Su, on a grass roots program, allowing us to

collaborate on issues related to DTD mappings and transformation

generation, Hong to get some exposure to the HP research lab as well.

A joint publication on this work has resulted.

Other collaborators:

We have had several interactions,

including an on-site visit, with members

of the PSE team  at Excelon Inc. (formerly called

Object Design Inc.), located in Burlington, Mass. 

They have provided us with a copy of the PSE

software, and  have developed a customized

patch of the software with support for features to

enable on-line evolution of both schema and persistent

objects.  They have continued to interact with us in

terms of updating their software as we discussed

additionally required fixes.


Activities and findings:

Research and Education Activities: 
Project Overview. This project investigates transparent schema change technology that allows for on-line modification of databases without disturbing existing applications. The methodology to tackle this problem is to integrate schema evolution and view support into one system. The resulting tool supports schema changes through a view rather than on the global schema, and preserves existing views through such changes. Within this proposed framework of transparent schema change, this project explores the following issues: (1) develop object-oriented view technology, (2) integrate view and schema evolution concepts into one mechanism supporting complex transformations; (3) develop algorithms for complex schema transformations as well as for transparent evolution;(4) develop and compare different OODB-based frameworks suitable for view and schema evolution support, (5) develop optimization strategies for view evolution, (6) perform experimental studies to evaluate the relative effectiveness of the proposed techniques, and (7) lastly extend the concepts and tools developed above as middle-layer services to distributed environments. Recent specific Project Tasks: * Implementation and testing of the SERF (Schema Evolution through an Extensible, Re-usable and Flexible Framework) into a working prototype system. Demonstration of SERF at ACM SIGMOD'1999. * Application of SERF to the problem of flexible web site management and restructuring to assess its limitations and its strength. For this, we have developed XML to OO mapping and loading strategies. This activitiy resulted in a system called ReWeb. Demonstration of ReWeb at ACM SIGMOD'2000. * Research into making SERF transformations consistent without limiting their expressive power nor the user's flexibility in expressing any transformation semantics they wish. For this, we have explored the notion of software contracts for assuring the correctness of a transformation before its application. Application of this idea in particular to the transformation support of the OO relationship modeling constructs, such as unary and binary relationships, has been completed. * We have designed and developed an extended framework for cross-model integration, called SANGAM. SANGAM has been applied to the integration of XML and relational data sources, and then to the evolution of their transformation to allow the two systems to stay in synch. The first prototype of SANGAM framework has been demonstrated at ACM SIGMOD'01.

Findings:
Our project goal is to increase interoperability between evolving software applications, ease migration of software over time, as well as increase the possibility of interfacing to legacy databases more effectively by means of OODB technology. Highlights of our accomplishments achieved towards that end include: SERF Framework for Extensible Schema Evolution Support. While current OODB systems only offer a fixed set (taxonomy) of primitive schema evolution operations, there has been work in recent years to try to define more complex evolution operations, such as merge-classes, transform-object-to-value. We instead have developed the first solution approach for enabling the support of arbitrarily complex schema evolution customized to user's needs. Our solution framework, called SERF (Schema Evoluton using Extensible, Re-usable, and Flexible Framework), is based on the general strategy to integrate a fixed set of primitive change operations with ODMG's object-query language (OQL) as vehicle for flexible object migration. This is the first framework focussing on extensiblity of evolution support in the database community. The SERF framework has been designed and implemented to test its feasibility and limitations. SERF has been formally demonstrated at ACM SIGMOD 1999, and the XML-based web management system build using SERF technology has been accepted for demonstration at ACM SIGMOD 2000 again. Initial research into making SERF transformations consistent without limiting their expressive power nor the user's flexibility in expressing any transformation semantics has resulted in a software-contract based solution. This approach has been applied to designing the first transformation methodology for correctly handling the evolution of the semantic relationship construct, such as unary and binary relationships. This represents a solid treatment for relationship evolution. Beyond flexible XML-based web site management, applications that can benefit from our SERF technology include for example e-business applications and heterogenous systems integration. Sangam: A Flexible Meta Model Integration System. A another contribution is the development of our generic cross-model framework, called SANGAM. Two features of novelty currently underdevelopment are: 1. a cross-data-model algebra that can be utilized to algebraically describe the integration of two heterogeneous data sources, and 2. a meta model of not only the two data models (XML and relational data model) to be integrated but rather also a meta model of the actual mapping strategies supported between two such data models. This allows for putting together mapping strategies at the meta level as well as for proving certain properties about the mappings as well as generated output of our mappings (such as type conformance). Both concepts remain to be implemented, integrated into our system, and tested.

Training and Development:
This project has partially funded several Ph.D. students in my database research groups: Harumi A. Kuno (female), graduated Summer 1996 from the University of Michigan, is now working at HP Research Labs, Palo Alto in Cal. Young-Gook Ra (male), graduated 1997 from University of Michigan, is now working in a university in Korea (after two years in industry; Samsung Data Systems, Korea). Jyh-Liang Amy Lee (female) is employed as a Assistant Professor in Hong Kong Science and Technology University starting 1999. She now has plans to relocate back to the United States. Anisoara Nica (female), May 1999, has started a position at Sybase Corporation. Kajal Claypool (female) is completing her Ph.d. in 2001 on this project. Kajal has accepted a tenure-track faculty position for 2001/2002 in the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. Several other Ph.D. at WPI have been involved in this NSF project in one form or another. This includes Andreas Koeller (male), who will be completing this Phd. in Fall 2001. Andreas is also considering an academic career. Xin Zhang (male), Hong Su (female), and Songting Chen (male) -- all of whom are likely to go either into academia or into some advanced industrial lab, once graduated. In addition, numerous Master students and undergraduate students have been involved in our project activities. This project has provided all of them with an array of training; including design of larger software, development of software, teamwork, testing of software, experimental evaluation and performance studies, as well as development of reports and presentations on the project. In fact, through weekly project meetings, several of the students had the continued opportunity to practice their presentation and discussion, and hence also their teaching skills. Impact on education and curriculum development has been at all levels. This project has increased education at the undergraduate level by providing small projects into which we actively can involve undergraduate students via directed study projects, REUs and CRA summer students. It has also enhanced our graduate courses, e.g, the Advanced Database course at WPI.

Outreach Activities:
This project has involved several female undergraduate students via the CRA summer mentorship program for several summers to provide them a fruitful environment to learn both about graduate school in general, about working in a group, as well as about conducting research and development. We hope that this will help to contribute to attracting females to the Computer Science discipline and to aim for higher education.

Journal Publications:
Crestana, V. M., Lee, A. and Rundensteiner, E. A.,, "Consistent Schema Version Removal: An Optimization Technique for Object-Oriented Views", IEEE Transaction on Data and Knowledge Engineering, vol. ?, (2000), p. to appear. Accepted
Kuno, H. A. and Rundensteiner, E.A., "Incremental Maintenance of Materialized Object-Oriented Views in MultiView: Strategies and Performance Evaluation", IEEE Trans. on Data and Knowledge Engineering, vol. v10,no5, (98), p. 768. Published
Jones, M. and Rundensteiner, E. A.,, "Database Support for the Implicit Unfolding of Hierarchical Structures", IEEE Transaction on Data and Knowledge Engineering, vol. ?, (?), p. ?. Accepted subject to minor revisions
Claypool, K. T. and Rundensteiner, E. A., "SERF: A Template-Based Schema Evolution Framework", IEEE Transactions on Data and Knowledge Engineering, vol. ?, (?), p. ?. Submitted
Harumi A. Kuno and Elke A. Rundensteiner, "The MultiView OODB View System: Design and Implementation", Theory and Practice of Object Systems, Theory and Practice of Object Systems (TAPOS). Int. Journal, Special Issue on Subjectivity, vol. v2/no3, (1997), p. 202-225. Published
Y.G. Ra, and Rundensteiner, E. A., "A Transparent Schema Evolution System Based on Object-Oriented View Technology", IEEE Trans. on Knowledge and Data Engineering,, vol. 4, (1997), p. 600. Published
A. Koeller and E. A. Rundensteiner, "View Synchronization: Using an Integrated Approach of Rewriting and Ranking View Queries", J. of Computer Science and Information Management Special Issue on Selected DOLAP'98 papers, vol. ?, (1999), p. ?. Accepted
E.A. Rundensteiner, K. Claypool, et al., "SERFing the Web: Web Site Management Made Easy ", ACM SIGMOD, vol. , (2000), p. 585. Published
E. A. Rundensteiner, A., Koeller, X. Zhang,, "Maintaining Data Warehouses over Changing Information Sources", Communications of the ACM,, vol. 43(6), (2000), p. 57. Published
Rundensteiner, E. A., Kuno, H. A. and Zhou, J., "Experimental Evaluation of the SMX Strategy for Incremental Materialized Path View Maintenance", Int. Journal of Computer Systems, Science and Engineering, Special Issue on Selected Papers from Object-Oriented Information Systems Conference., vol. Nov., (1999), p. 331-342. Published
Claypool, K. T. and Rundensteiner, E. A.,, "Flexible Database Transformations: The SERF Approach", IEEE Bulletin, Special Issue on Database Transformation Technology,, vol. March, (1999), p. 19-24. Published
Claypool, K. T. and Rundensteiner, E. A.,, "Personal Views for E-Commerce Applications", IEEE Bulletin, Special Issue on Database Technology for E-Commerce, vol. March, (2000), p. 25-31. Published
Claypool, K. T., Rundensteiner, E. A., Chen, L., and Kothari, B., "Re-usable ODMG-based Templates for Web View Generation and Restructuring", CIKM'98 Workshop on Web Information and Data Management (WIDM'98), vol. Nov., (1998), p. 40. Published
Claypool, K.T., Jin, J., and Rundensteiner, E.A., "SERF: Schema Evolution through an Extensible, Re-usable and Flexible Framework", Seventh Int. Conf. on Info. and Knowledge Management (CIKM'98), vol. Nov., (1998), p. 314-321. Published
E.A. Rundensteiner, K. Claypool, et al., "SERF: ODMG-Based Generic Re-structuring Facility", ACM SIGMOD, demonstration paper., vol. May, (1999), p. 568-570. Published
Kajal T. Claypool, Elke A. Rundensteiner and George T. Heineman, "ROVER: Flexible Yet Consistent Evolution of Relationships", Data and Knowledge Engineering Journal, vol. , (2001), p. . Accepted
Xin, Z. and Rundensteiner, E. A., "Integrating the Maintenance and Synchronization of Data Warehouses Using a Cooperative Framework", Information Systems, Journal,, vol. , (2001), p. . Accepted
Amy J. Lee, Anisoara Nica, and Elke A. Rundensteiner, "The EVE Approach: View Synchronization In Dynamic Distributed Environments", IEEE Transaction on Data and Knowledge Engineering, vol. , (2001), p. . Accepted
Lily Chen, Kajal T. Claypool and Elke A. Rundensteiner,, "SERFing the Web: The Re-Web Approach for Web Re-Structuring", World Wide Web journal, Special Issue on ``World Wide Web Data Management', vol. Summer, (2000), p. 1. Published
X. Zhang, E. A. Rundensteiner, and L. Ding, "PVM: Parallel View Maintenance Under Concurrent Data Updates Of Distributed Sources,", Third International Conference on Data Warehousing and Knowledge Discovery (DaWaK'00), Italy, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), Springer Verlag, vol. , (2001), p. . Accepted
K. Claypool, E. A. Rundensteiner, X. Zhang, H. Su, H. Kuno, G. Mitchell, and W.C. Chen,, "Model Management - A Solution to Support Multiple Data Models, Their Mappings and Maintenance", ACM Sigmod (software demonstration paper), vol. , (2001), p. 1. Published
J. Chen, X. Zhang, S. Chen, A. Koeller, E. A. Rundensteiner,, "DyDa: Data Warehouse Maintenance in a Fully Concurrent Environments", ACM SIGMOD (software demonstration paper), vol. , (2001), p. 1. Published
Li Chen, Elke A. Rundensteiner, Afshan Ally, Rice Chen and Weidong Kou,, "Active Page Generation via Customizing XML for Data Beans in E-Commerce Applications,", 2nd International Symposium on Electronic Commerce (ISEC2001), vol. April, (2001), p. 1. Published
Xin Zhang, Gail Mitchell, Wang-chien Lee, Elke Rundensteiner,, "Clock:Synchronizing Internal Relational Storage with External XML Documents", IEEE RIDE Workshop, April 2001. RIDE-DM 2001: 111-118., vol. April, (2001), p. 111. Published
Diane Kramer, Hong Su, Li Chen, Kajal Claypool, Elke A. Rundensteiner,, "Change Management of Evolving XML Documents", IEEE RIDE Workshop, April 2000. RIDE-DM 2001: 103-110 , vol. april, (2001), p. 103. Published
Luping Quan, Li Chen, Elke A. Rundensteiner., "Argos: Efficient Refresh in an XQL-Based Web Caching System", Web Database Workshop'2000, May 2000. (co-located with ACM SIGMOD), vol. May, (2000), p. 1. Published
Chen, L. and Rundensteiner, E. A., "Aggregation Path Index for Incremental Web View Maintenance", The Second International Workshop on Advanced Issues of E-Commerce and Web-based Information Systems (WECWIS 2000), vol. June, (2000), p. 1. Published
Kajal T. Claypool, Chandrakant Natarajan and Elke, A. Rundensteine, "Optimizing the Performance of Schema Evolution Sequences", ECOOP 2000, Objects and Databases Workshop, Springer Verlag, vol. 1813, (2000), p. 114. Published
Lingli Ding, Xin Zhang, and Elke Rundensteiner,, "Dynamic Data Warehouse Maintenance in a Fully Concurrent Environment,", Second International Conference on Data Warehousing and Knowledge Discovery (DaWaK'00), Greenwich, UK, Sept 4 to 6, 2000,, vol. Sept, (2000), p. 94. Published
A. Koeller and Elke A. Rundensteiner, "A History-Driven Approach at Evolving Views Under Meta Data Changes", Second International Conference on Data Warehousing and Knowledge Discovery (DaWaK'00), Greenwich, UK, Sept 4 to 6, 2000, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), Springer Verlag, Sept. 2000. 168-177., vol. Sept., (2000), p. 168. Published
Kajal T. Claypool, Elke A. Rundensteiner and George T. Heineman,, "ROVER: A Framework for Evolution of Relationships,", International Conference on Conceptual Modeling, ER'2000, Salt Lake City, Oct. 2000. 409-422. NOMINATION FOR BEST PAPER AWARD., vol. Oct., (2000), p. 409. Published
Hong Su, Kajal T. Claypool, and Elke. A. Rundensteiner, "Extending the Object Query Language for Transparent Metadata Access", DEMM'2000 Workshop, Germany, Dagstuhl, Heidelberg, Oct. 2000. FMLDO 2000: 182-201., vol. Oct., (2000), p. 182. Published
Kajal T. Claypool, and Elke. A. Rundensteiner, and George T. Heineman,, "Evolving the Software of a Schema Evolution System", DEMM'2000 Workshop, Germany, Dagstuhl, Heidelberg, Oct. 2000. FMLDO 2000: 68-84., vol. Oct, (2000), p. 68. Published

Book(s) of other one-time publications(s):
E. A. Rundensteiner (Special Issue Editor), "Data Transformation Technology" , bibl. (Issue Editor: E. A. Rundensteiner), (1999). Special Issue Published
of Collection: David Lomet (Bulletin editor), "IEEE Bulletin in Data Engineering"
E. A. Rundensteiner (Special Issue Editor), "Database Technology for E-Commerce" , bibl. Issue Editor: E. A. Rundensteiner, (2000). Special Issue Published
of Collection: David Lomet (Bulletin editor), "IEEE Bulletin in Data Engineering"
Ming Li, "Optimizer for OQL Templates" , bibl. MS Thesis, WPI, (1999). Thesis Published
of Collection: , "MS Thesis, WPI"
Xin Zhang, "Data Warehouse Maintenance Under Interleaved Schema and Data Updates" , bibl. MS Thesis, WPI, (1999). Thesis Published
Chandrakant Natarajan, "Optimization of Schema Evolution Sequences" , bibl. MS Thesis, WPI., (1998). Thesis Published
Jin Jing, "An Extensible OO Schema Evolution Framework Using OQL " , bibl. MS Thesis, WPI., (1998). Thesis Published
A. Nica, "View Evolution Support for Information Integration Systems over Dynamic Distributed Information Spaces" , bibl. Dissertation, EECS Department, University of Michigan, (1999). Thesis Published
of Collection: , "Dissertation Engineering and Computer Science Department, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, May 1999"
Amy Lee, "Schema Evolution Techniques" , bibl. EECS Department, University of Michigan, (1998). Thesis Published
of Collection: , "Dissertation Engineering and Computer Science Department, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Dec 1998"
Yijing Zhou, "Implementation and Performance Evaluation for Incremental Path View Maintenance" , bibl. MS Thesis, WPI, (1998). Thesis Published
Rundensteiner, E. A., "Data Warehousing" , bibl. Macmillan's Computer Sciences, Encyclopedia in Computer Sciences, four-volumes., (2001). Entry in a Encyclopedia Accepted
of Collection: (Kathleen Edgar, Senior Editor), "Macmillan's Computer Sciences, Encyclopedia in Computer Sciences, four-volumes, Audience: high school and undergraduate college students. Invited entry, Macmillan Reference USA/The Gale Group"
Diane Kraemer, "XEM: XML Evolution Management" , bibl. MS. Thesis, WPI Computer Science Department, (2001). Thesis Published
Lingli Ding, "Scalable Maintenance in Distributed Data Warehousing Environment" , bibl. MS Thesis, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Computer Science Dept., (2001). Thesis Published

Other Specific Products:

Software (or netware)
SERF (Schema Evolution using an Extensible,  Reusable and Flexible

Framework), a generic restructuring facility, has been designed and

implemented by several students at WPI over the past several years. 

It's an ODMG-compliant system that is 100% java-based

and implemented on top of  the commercial object server PSE

(Persistent Storage Engine) by ObjectDesign Inc. (now called Excelon

Corp.)  as its basic platform. It is composed of an OQL query

engine, an ODMG-compliant meta repository, a library manager, the

restructuring layer, as well as a Graphical User Interface.

This system has also been selected for demonstration and publication

at ACM SIGMOD'99, one of the premier conferences in the field in  May

1999. [ The corresponding publication is E.A. Rundensteiner, K.

Claypool, M. Li, L. Chen, X. Zhang, C. Natarajan, J. Jing, S. De Lima,

S. Weiner,

``SERF: ODMG-Based Generic Re-structuring Facility,''

{\it ACM SIGMOD'99 Conf}, Software system demonstration and paper,

Philadelphia, USA, May 1999. ]
We have made the system available to anyone that has requested it. In

particular, we are developing an on-line client-server application of

the system so that visitors to our site can play with the demo without

having to download and install the system themselves.
Software (or netware)
EVE, the Evolvable View Environment system,

is a distributed relational data warehousing system that

has been developed  at WPI over the past two years.

EVE maintains materialized data warehouses for high-performance

analysis under both schema and  data changes of its

underlying data sources. EVE is  a middle-layer service in Java

that interfaces to different relational database base engines

such as Oracle 7.0 and Microsoft Access via  a

JDBC and a JDBC-ODBC bridge, respectively.

Different versions of this system have been

presented at a several conferences over the past two years.

Most notably, the EVE prototype system has recently been selected

for demonstration and publication at

ACM SIGMOD'99, one of the premier conferences in the

[ The corresponding publication is

Elke A. Rundensteiner, Andreas Koeller, Xin Zhang, Amy J. Lee, and

Anisoara Nica, Amber VanWyk, and Yong Li,

``Evolvable View Environment (EVE): Non-Equivalent View Maintenance

under Schema Changes,''ACM SIGMOD'99 Conf, Software system

demonstration and paper, Philadelphia, USA, May 1999.]

We have made both a life demonstration of the EVE system as well as

the actual source code available on our project page.
Software (or netware)
MultiView, the first object-oriented view system that dealt with

integrated class and view hierarchies and that had extensive

optimizaton strategies for incremental view maintenance. MultiView was

build in Smalltalk on top of the Gemstone OODB system by Servio

Logic.
We have made the system available as down-load source code at the

University of Michigan.
Software (or netware)
TSE (Transparent Schema Evolution Technology). TSE was build on top

of

the MultiView OODB system. TSE combined schema evolution with view

support in order to enable transparent evolution of schemata by

diverse user groups that were cooperating on related OODB data

sources.
TSE was released as freeware software together with MultiView System

at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Software (or netware)
DyDa: Data Warehouse Maintenance under Fully Concurrent Environments

--- Songting Chen, Jun Chen, Xin Zhang, Andreas Koeller and Elke A.

Rundensteiner, Software system demonstration, Proceedings of

SIGMOD'01, Santa Barabra, CA USA, May 2001. 

Dyda features one strategy towards maintaining a data warehouse under

both concurrent data updates and concurrent schema changes in

distributed data sources.

Dyda system was demonstrated at ACM SIGMOD'01. A release on our

webpage is planned.
Software (or netware)
SANGAM Model Management - A Solution to Support Multiple Data

Models, Their Mappings and Maintenance,

K. Claypool, E. A. Rundensteiner, X. Zhang,

H. Su, H. Kuno, G. Mitchell, and W.C. Chen,

software demonstration at ACM SIGMOD, May 2001.
the Sangam system was demonstrated at ACM SIGMOD'01.

Internet Dissemination:

http://davis.wpi.edu/dsrg/OOSE

Please see also:  http://davis.wpi.edu/dsrg

Contributions:

Contributions within Discipline:

 The area of this project is object-oriented database systems (OODBs).

OODBs offer powerful and flexible modeling support to handle the needs

of diverse application domains, including modeling constructs, such as

classes, abstractions, inheritance, reuse, and behavioral modeling.

Thus, typically OODBs are being used as foundation when developing

(re-usable) database support for application-specific features, such

as spatial data or history management. One important issue for

databases in general and for OODBs in particular is schema evolution,

the modification of the schema and the associated application data

during the lifetime of a database system. Most work in the literature

focussed on the realization of schema evolution operations in the

context of a particular data model or even OODB, such as, Objectstore,

Gemstone, Ithasca, or O2. Support is  restricted to primitive

evolution support only. Our project extends this previous work now

providing complex extensible evolution support, as well as

transparency of executing such schema changes on a shared OODB while

minimally impacting existing applications.



This project thus contributes to the base of knowledge in the database

field by providing a novel approach at extensible yet flexible

evolution support. This includes the development of a well-founded

theory of evolution, as well as the design and implementation of an

actual prototype that verifies the feasiblity of the proposed ideas.

Lastly, we have also conducted a number of experimental studies that

demonstrate the performance advantages and limitations of our proposed

optimization strategies. Such a testbed and associated experimental

findings are beneficial for anyone wanting to proceed along this line

of research and/or wanting to build some commercial software system

for evolution support.



In addition, we have also taken a stab at addressing the related

problem of the evolution (and hence first the modeling of) the mapping

across heterogeneous data sources, rather than just OODBs. In

particular, we have developed a general framework for cross-model

mappings, that includes an cross-model algebra, update propagation

operators, as well as a meta-model of the cross-maps themselves.




Contributions to Other Disciplines:
 While our background and major emphasis is on database and information

technologies, our ideas of flexibly handling evolution of systems

should also have impact on the software engineering industry.



Techniques for the ease in migration of software

over time as well as the possibility of interfacing to legacy

databases more effectively are critical problems also being explored

by the software academic communit and by the software industry in

general. 



Our techniques can be applied to address evolution, migration and

integration problems for a wide array of different disciplines, such

as engineering, medicine and other applications. 




Contributions to Education and Human Resources:
 This project has partially funded several Ph.D. students who now have

gone either into academia or into research labs. This thus is a

contribution of the project to the skilled workforce so desparately

needed by our nation, and more so to providing teachers of the future

for our universities.



For example,  Harumi A. Kuno (female), graduated Summer 1996 from

the University of Michigan, is working at HP Research Labs, Palo Alto

in Cal. now.



Young-Gook Ra (male), graduated 1997 from University of  Michigan,

first joined at Samsung Data Systems, Korea. Data Sun, but is now

Professor of Computer Eng. Dept., Hankyonng National University,

Korea.



Jyh-Liang Amy Lee (female), graduated 1998 from University of 

Michigan, is tenure track faculty member  at the Hong Kong University

of Science and Technology this year. She currently is the process of

relocating back to the United States.



Kajal Claypool (female) is completing her Ph.d. the fall of 2001 on

this project. Kajal has accepted a tenure-track faculty position

for 2001/2002 in the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.



Several other Ph.D. at WPI have been involved in this NSF project in

one form or another. This includes Andreas Koeller, Xin Zhang, Hong

Su, and Songting Chen -- all of whom are likely to go either into

academia or into some advanced industrial lab, once graduated.



In addition, several Master's students have conducted their Master's

thesis research under this project, as listed under the publications

list.



Furthermore, a number of undergraduate students have been involved in

activities of this project through the year. 



Lastly, this NSF project has lead to course projects for students in

both our graduate as well as our undergraduate database courses at

WPI, such as the Database Systems Course (CS542) and the Advanced

Database Systems course (CS561). Thus they contribute to the education

of our students.




Contributions to Resources for Science and Technology:
 Several software systems have been released as part of this project,

which now can be used freely by others in their research as well as

educational projects.



Such software can be utilized as starting points for course projects

by others, or they can also be utilized as testbed for conducting

other types of experimental studies - beyond what we are attempting in

our current project.


Contributions Beyond Science and Engineering:
 Increased interoperability, ease in migration of software

over time, as well as the possibility of interfacing to legacy

databases more effectively are critical problems faced by software

industry. Our project promises to provide practical solutions to these

important goals. The SERF framework is the first approach to providing

extensible yet consistent evolution support. Our solutions are based

on standard technologies, whenever possible and appropriate, such as

the ODMG object model and the OQL query language, to allow quick

dissemination and use of our ideas by industry.



SERF has multiple important applications, ranging from schema

evolution of one central system, to mapping between two heterogeneous

databases or even data models (migration), to functioning

as middle-layer technology by integrating multiple data sources and

producing views.



As another example, the development of SANGAM, a framework for

supporting cross-model mapping at an algebra level has the potential

to offer a much more disciplined approach towards integrating

databases with distinct data models such as say XML data sources and

relational data engines.




Special Requirements for Annual Project Report:

Unobligated funds: less than 20 percent of current funds


Categories for which nothing is reported:
Special Reporting Requirements
Animal, Human Subjects, Biohazards


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