Models for Cooperative Activities over the Web

The Chapter discusses the need and the problems associated with WEB based cooperative activities in which several team members work in parallel on a common task. Models for software systems supporting such cooperative activities are discussed. Our models describe structure of the cooperation object, cooperation modes and the network message synchronization, that are of prime importance when the system members work at different places and communicate over the Internet. We introduce and describe a component requirements graph and show how to translate it into an interaction graph. The state diagrams and the design graphs are the basis for the WEB software design. The discussion of software architecture for implementing cooperative activities over the Web is also provided.

Web Retrieval of XML Documents

Web is characterized by a huge amount of very heterogeneous data sources, that differ both in media support and format representation. In this scenario, there is the need of an integrating approach for querying heterogeneous Web documents. To this purpose, XML can play an important role since it is becoming a standard for data representation and exchange over the Web. Due to its flexibility, XML is currently being used as an interface language over the Web, by which (part of) document sources are represented and exported. Under this assumption, the problem of querying heterogeneous sources can be reduced to the problem of querying XML data sources. In this chapter, we first survey the most relevant query languages for XML data proposed both by the scientific community and by standardization committees, e.g., W3C, mainly focusing on their expressive power. Then, we investigate how typical Information Retrieval concepts, such as ranking, similarity-based search, and profile-based search, can be applied to XML query languages. Commercial products based on the considered approaches are then briefly surveyed. Finally, we conclude the chapter by providing an overview of the most promising research trends in the fields.

Web-Dialogue Management for Insurance Products

The IP.COM concept enables an end-user to compose automatically an insurance product after conducting a dialogue with a knowledge-based system. This reduces the dependencies of insurance companies on both the IT and the actuarial expert. The system is able to adjust the dialogue interactively according to the specific needs of the users and asks for the relevant data needed for the desired product.

Flexible Digital Library Search

In this chapter the development of a specialised search engine for a digital library is described. The proposed system architecture consists of three levels: the conceptual, the logical and the physical level. The conceptual level schema enables by its exposure of a domain specific schema semantically rich conceptual search. The logical level provides a description language to achieve a high degree of flexibility for multimedia retrieval. The physical level takes care of scalable and efficient persistent data storage. The role, played by each level, changes during the various stages of a search engine’s lifecycle: (1) modeling the index, (2) populating and maintaining the index and (3) querying the index. The integration of all this functionality allows the combination of both conceptual and content-based querying in the query stage. A search engine for the Australian Open tennis tournament website is used as a running example, which shows the power of the complete architecture and its various components.

The Design of the DEAFIN Web-Geographical Information System

The design of a Web-geographical information system strongly requires methodological and operational tools to deal with information distributed in multiple, autonomous and heterogeneous data sources, and a uniform data publishing methodology and policy over Internet web sites. In this chapter, we describe our experience for the activities of requirement analysis and conceptual design of the DEAFIN Web-geographical information system whose objective is to improve the quality and the comparability of information about available industrial vacant sites, coming from different regional data sources. Heterogeneity and web availability requirements have been taken into account in the system architecture design. The DEAFIN system is thus conceived as a federated web-based information system, capable of managing and providing access to all the regional relevant information in an integrated and complete fashion. Furthermore, since the data available by a given DEAFIN region partner can be both spatial data and alphanumeric data, for each regional component system in the DEAFIN system, a Web-GIS system is defined.

Application Service Provider Aggregation Architecture

Application service providers (ASPs) are a new type of service providers that make the whole spectrum from low-end applications like e-mail systems to high-end applications like enterprise resource planning (ERP) management systems available to customers over the Internet through browser-based user interfaces (application hosting). This relieves a customer from installing and managing the applications himself in his own data center. Instead, the customer pays a fee for accessing the application over the Internet. However, as soon as a customer uses several applications hosted by different ASPs, a management burden arises for the customer as well as an application integration problem, since the applications are hosted individually by several ASPs without any coordination or data exchange between them. The arising integration (aggregation) problems are discussed in this chapter. An ASP aggregation architecture is defined based on B2B integration servers that address these problems by supporting the seamless access and seamless integration of all hosted applications hiding the differences between the ASPs.

An Approach to Web-Based Application Integration Using Java Adapters and XML

This chapter is concerned with Application-to-Application (A2A) integration, in dynamic heterogeneous environments, where applications are not aware of each other in advance and must therefore exchange data in a peer to peer (P2P) fashion. This is achieved via dynamic discovery of application services and integration through XML message exchange using Java adapters.

Data Schema Integration in Web-Enabled Systems

In the recent years, most enterprises have started to experience the use of the Web for work cooperation to improve efficiency and information interchange. As a consequence, enterprise information systems are being migrated onto the web, and methods and tools to effectively access data provided on the web in different formats from the autonomous heterogeneous data sources are required. In particular, integration tools are required to obtain a uniform data representation by abstracting from the formats in the origin data sources and thus to build a global information space suitable for query and access interface. The chapter will be devoted to discuss the characteristics of data schema integration in web-enabled, and to describe a comprehensive integration scheme for organizing heterogeneous information sources over the web, to enhance the capability of information interchange and interoperation among web-enabled systems.

Entity Identification of Fuzzy Multidatabase Systems with Incompatible Keys

Database schema integration is an important discipline for constructing heterogeneous multidatabase systems on one hand. On the other hand, fuzzy information has been introduced into relational databases and studied extensively. However, the issues of integrating local fuzzy relations are rarely addressed. In this chapter, we focus on schema integration of fuzzy multidatabase systems. In particular, we develop a method for identifying the entities in fuzzy multidatabase integration with incompatible keys.

XML Schema Integration to Facilitate E-Commerce

XML has become the de facto standard for Information Exchange protocol for e-commerce and many workgroup applications such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). The availability of large amounts of heterogeneous distributed web data necessitates the integration of XML data from multiple XML sources for many reasons. Currently, there are many e-commerce companies, which sell similar products but represent them using different XML schemas with possibly different ontologies. When any two such companies merge, there is a need for a uniform schema integration methodology. In some applications like comparison-shopping, there is a need for an illusionary centralized homogeneous information system. In this chapter, we propose an XML Schema integration methodology. We define an object-oriented data model called XSDM (XML Schema Data Model) and present a graphical representation of XML Schema for the purpose of schema integration. We use a three-layered architecture for XML Schema integration, with each layer presenting an integrated view of the concepts that characterize the layer below. The three layers included are namely pre-integration, comparison and integration. During pre-integration, an analysis of the schemas to be integrated occurs. During the comparison phase of integration, correspondences as well as conflicts between elements are identified. During the integration phase, restructuring and merging of the initial schemas takes place to obtain the global schema. We define integration policies for integrating element definitions as well as their data types and attributes. The policies are also applicable in integrating DTD schemas with other DTD/XML Schemas.