Preface
This book provides a collection of outstanding chapters from across many different areas
of database systems and is primarily intended for researchers and practitioners from academia and industry working in this field. The chapters include theoretical and applied
contributions to the field. The book covers traditional issues in databases, such as query processing and optimization, as well as emerging technologies like electronic commerce and workflow management.
Many of the chapters in this book are expanded versions of the best papers presented at
the First International Workshop on Issues and Applications of Database Technology,
which was held in Berlin in July 1998. The papers were selected based on the reviews for
the workshop and then were improved substantially by the authors. In addition to these
selected papers, the book also features invited chapters from the fields of workflow
technology and electronic commerce.
The first chapter, by Peter Muth, Jeanine Weissenfels and Gerhard Weikum, provides a discussion of the state of the art in workflow research and technology with regard to its applicability to and benefits for electronic commerce. The next chapter, Trading W0 rkflows on Electronic Markets by Andreas Geppert, Markus Kradolfer and Dimitrios Tombros, presents a framework for market-based interorganizational workflow management. In this framework, the tasks executed in a workflow are regarded as goods traded on an electronic
market. In An Electronic Marketplace Architecture by Asuman Dogac, Ilker Durusoy, Sena
Arpinar, Nesime Tatbul and Pinar Koksal, an architecture is described for a distributed
marketplace whose SCOpe can be the whole Web where electronic commerce is realized
through buying agents representing the customers and selling agents representing the
resources like electronic catalogs. Aphrodite Tsalgatidou describes a set of criteria for
selecting appropriate tools to be used for business process transformation and automation among a diversity of tools offered by software vendors in her chapter, Reengineering and
Automation of Business Processes: Criteria for Selecting Supporting Tools.
David Taniar and J. Wenny Rahayu (A Taxonomyfor Object-Oriented Queries) present a comprehensive study on object-oriented queries considering all aspects of an object data model. Then Rahul Tikekar, Farshad Fotouhi and Don Ragan extend previous work on query optimization by considering a tertiary storage system complementing primary and secondary storage devices in their chapter, Query Optimization in Tertiary Storage Based Systems Using a Generalized Storage Model. Some relational join algorithms are optimized
in a tertiary storage system setup.
The chapter by Ahmet Cosar (Alternative Plan Generation for Multiple Query Optimi— zation) presents a heuristic algorithm for the problem of selecting an alternative plan from
among a set of alternative execution plans for multiple queries. The algorithm minimizes
the total cost of evaluating all of the queries. It also provides the evaluation results of two
new methods proposed for generating alternative execution plans for a given query.
shared-everything environment for efficient query processing in their chapter, Integrating [/0 Processing and Transparent Parallelism: Toward Comprehensive Query Execution in Parallel Database Systems.
In Rule Inheritance and Overriding in Active Object-Oriented Databases, Naumann Chaudhry, James Moyne, and Elke Rundensteiner present a formal model for rule inherit— ance and overriding in active object-oriented databases. The notion of syntactic compatibil-ity is extended to active rules and enforced in the proposed formal model. Arne Koschel, Stella Gatziu, Gunter von Bultzingsloewen and Hans Fritschi apply unbundling to active database systems in their chapter, Unbundling Active Database Systems. This allows the use of active capabilities with any arbitrary database management system and in broader contexts like heterogeneous and distributed information systems. Mario Nascimento ’5 chapter presents an approach to yield efficient access to degenerate temporal relations; i.e., temporal relations where valid time behaves as transaction time. The chapter also includes the evaluation results of the proposed approach.
In Three—Dimensional Spatial Match Representation and Retrieval for Iconic Image Databases, Jae—Wood Chang and Yeon—Jung Kim provide new three-dimensional spatial match representation schemes to support context-based image retrieval in an efficient way. Wassili Kazakos, Ralf Kramer, Ralf Nokolai, Claudia Roler, Sigfus Bjarnason and Stefan Jensen’s chapter, WebCDS-A Java Based Catalogue System for Eur0pean Environment Data, presents a web-based catalogue system for European environmental data that takes the advantage of most recent Java technology at the server site. The last chapter, Mining Library Catalogues: Best-Match Retrieval Based on exact-Match Interfaces by J .E. Wolff and J. Kalinski presents an approach to maximize the number of highly relevant data records that are transferred in gathering information from distributed repositories, transferred in gathering information from distributed repositories, considering the restrictions of local warehouse resources and generated load.
We are pleased to have assembled these high-quality chapters for this book. We would like to thank all contributing authors; without their cooperation this book would not have been possible. We are also grateful to Jan Travers, managing editor of Idea Group Publishing, for her assistance in the preparation of this volume.
Asuman Dogac, Middle East Technical University, Turkey M. Tamer Ozsu, University of Alberta, Canada
