TEMPORAL META-DATA MANAGEMENT FOR MODEL

DRIVEN APPLICATIONS

Provides Full Temporal Execution Capabilities throughout the Meta-data EIS

Application Lifecycle

Jon Davis and Elizabeth Chang

Curtin University of Technology, Curtin Business School, Bentley, 6102, Australia

Keywords: Meta-data, Meta-model, Temporal execution, EIS, Lifecycle, Version control, Version management.

Abstract: In this paper we discuss how the application of temporal data management techniques to the atomic

elements of a meta-data application model can provide for a complete temporal execution capability for

meta-data Enterprise Information Systems (EIS) applications by maintaining a perfect synchronisation of

historical data and historical application states. Temporal data management is a well understood field as it

applies to the common database and its application to the meta-data EIS application lifecycle in such a

solution would minimise the reduction of historical information accessibility currently experienced in most

applications as the logical application functionality and data formats are regularly changed due to often

irreversible version upgrades.

1 INTRODUCTION

Software applications are released by developers as

discrete versions, which often create platform or

data structure incompatibilities with previous

versions. Data structure incompatibilities are

typically resolved via the developer’s specific

upgrade process however there can be instances

where the update results in issues such as reduced

data granularity or access, especially for historical

data, or where some previous desired functionality is

lost and replaced with different functions.

Throughout the application’s lifecycle there will

be great variance in functionality and data access

that can usually only be accessed as a functional

snapshot at any instance.

As a result of ongoing research into the

modelling of meta-data Enterprise Information

Systems (EIS) applications, we have merged

temporal data management techniques with the

atomic modelling level of the meta-data EIS models

to form our temporal meta-model framework for EIS

applications.

This merging of techniques can be supported by

a single runtime execution engine for the modelled

meta-data EIS applications that provides full

temporal independence for the application and data.

As the executed application is based on the meta-

data definition for a designated time, and the data is

similarly and simultaneously managed temporally,

then the true state of an application in terms of its

version, functionality and data is immediately

accessible, at any required historical time, regardless

of the patch or update history and its effects.

This paper reviews related works, including

temporal data management, examines the

application to a meta-data based application model,

and provides examples where the hybrid application

can be used effectively in real enterprises.

2 RELATED WORKS

The following related issues have guided this

research.

2.1 Temporal Data Management

Temporal data management techniques have long

been a well developed and understood field

(Gregersen, 1999). With varying levels of

complexity solutions available they tend to adhere to

the same basic rules.

376

Davis J. and Chang E..

TEMPORAL META-DATA MANAGEMENT FOR MODEL DRIVEN APPLICATIONS - Provides Full Temporal Execution Capabilities throughout the

Meta-data EIS Application Lifecycle.

DOI: 10.5220/0003467203760379

In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS-2011), pages 376-379

ISBN: 978-989-8425-55-3

 2011 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

(Wrembel, 2007) describe their multiversion data

warehouse which internally manages discrete sets of

each schema version (the data structure) and the

instance version (the actual data).

When temporal data management is applied to

application logic it is analogous to dynamic source

code version management.

2.2 Source Code Version Control

The management of source code has followed

software development trends through multiple

programs and variants (De Alwis, 2009), across

multiple and distributed teams tracking the

development of the components and managing the

baseline of software developments (Ren, 2010)

throughout the multiple phases of projects (Kaur,

2009).

To support a temporal execution environment

requires a level of control over the atomic meta-data

definitions within the meta-data EIS application

model and is also fundamentally tied to direct

dynamic execution.

2.3 Model Driven Engineering

Model Driven Engineering (MDE) is a generic term

for software development that involves the creation

of an abstract model and how it is transformed to a

working implementation (Schmidt, 2006).

With potentially frequent and rapid changes to

the application’s meta-data model definition, by

users, a more dynamic versioning capability as

provided by applying temporal data management to

the meta-data is a complementary solution.

2.4 Dynamic Meta-data Model

Framework for EIS Applications

Our ongoing research project is based on our

assertion that performance of the analysis and

efficient collection of this information can also

perform the bulk of the design phase for an EIS

application, largely as a simultaneous activity. With

the collective design requirements stored and

available in a meta-model structure, EIS applications

can be executed automatically from the model with

the availability of the runtime components (Davis,

2004).

It is the application of temporal data

management to this meta-model structure that can

extend the temporal scope of the application logic to

any historical state, regardless of any subsequent

levels of fixes, patches or upgrades performed to the

underlying meta-model of the modelled application.

3 TEMPORAL META-DATA

MANAGEMENT

The benefits of a solution providing temporal

application logic include:

• Historical execution of applications regardless

of the deployment history of application fixes,

patches or upgrades that may have:

o Altered the underlying data including

deleting or transforming existing data,

o Removed or modified logical

application functionality.

• Access to historic or previous business rules,

• Access to the exact state of historical data, prior

to any subsequent rollup or additional

processing.

3.1 Definitions

We provide the following definitions:

• Temporal Data Window: is the period of time

over which the application data in the database

is guaranteed to be known and available for any

point of time within that period.

• Temporal Application Window: is the period

of time for which the current application version

maintains full compatibility with the data

schema and provides full application

functionality over the complete database.

• Temporal Application Effectiveness: is the

multiplication of the Temporal Data Window

and Temporal Application Window to provide

an indication of the maximum temporal

accessibility of the system architecture as a

whole.

3.2 Measuring Temporal Application

Effectiveness

We review the practical Temporal Application

Effectiveness of various application and database

architectures using these criteria as follows:

3.2.1 Common Application

A Common Application is defined as any

application executed from a static non-temporally

varying codebase, and accessing a database schema

TEMPORAL META-DATA MANAGEMENT FOR MODEL DRIVEN APPLICATIONS - Provides Full Temporal

Execution Capabilities throughout the Meta-data EIS Application Lifecycle

377

without temporal data management features - the

most common style of applications.

As data is not temporally managed, data is only

current and representative as of the current moment

in time, hence the Temporal Data Window of this

system can only ever be equal to the period since the

most recent data transaction.

The Temporal Application Window of the

system is the absolute period of the current version

of the application.

The Temporal Application Effectiveness (see

Figure 1) is thus at a minimum due to the low

Temporal Data Window, where only the current data

state can ever be known with certainty.

Figure 1: Temporal analysis of the Common Application.

3.2.2 Temporal Data Application

A Temporal Data Application is an application

which is similar to the Common Application but

accesses a database schema which provides effective

temporal data management features.

The Temporal Application Window of the

system is identical to that of the Common

Application.

The Temporal Data Window of this system could

become continuous but as the application is changed

then it is limited to only increase to match the time

period of the Temporal Application Window for the

Common Application.

The Temporal Application Effectiveness

achieved is now much higher than the Common

Application, as all historical data states within a

static application version are available.

Figure 2: Temporal analysis of the Temporal Data

Application.

3.2.3 Full Temporal Meta-Data Application

A Full Temporal Meta-Data Application is defined

as an application executed from a dynamic and

temporally varying codebase, and accessing a

database schema which also provides effective

temporal data management features.

The Temporal Data Window of this system is

continuous.

The Temporal Application Window of the

system is now increased to include the full periods

of all various or discrete system lifecycles or

generations.

The Temporal Application Effectiveness

achieved is also at a maximum, as the true data state

can be obtained at any time and with full application

functionality support.

Figure 3: Temporal analysis of the Full Temporal Meta-

Data Application.

3.3 Practical Examples of Using Full

Temporal Meta-Data Applications

To illustrate some of the operational benefits that

Full Temporal Meta-Data Applications (FTMDA)

can bring, the following example scenarios are

provided:

• Data Rollover: Financial systems in particular

aim to concentrate on the current financial year

encouraging closing off and rolling over from

the previous year The FTMDA can remove the

need for any unnecessary archival or pruning of

the data by allowing users to access full

historical data on demand, and more

importantly, accessing the historical data using

the previously current business rules rather than

any since updated or revised business rules.

• Reporting: The re-production of statistical or

analytical reports can also be difficult as source

data or reporting and processing formats are

changed. The FTMDA allows a rollback to

access both the historical data and the original

reporting and analysis tools (themselves also

instances of potentially changed meta-data

logic).

TemporalApplication

Effectiveness

Temporal

ApplicationWindow

TemporalData

Window

TemporalApplication

Effectiveness

Temporal

ApplicationWindow

TemporalData

Window

TemporalApplication

Effectiveness

TemporalApplication

Window

TemporalData

Window

ICEIS 2011 - 13th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

378

• Auditing: Audit records are not always

maintained throughout the lifecycle of a system.

However, it is inherent in the FTMDA that a

complete audit history of the data is maintained

in order to facilitate the temporal data

management aspects.

• Aged Data: an alternative to data rollover is

other selective data pruning based on aspects

such as the age of data or in terms of its

relevancy based on how often it is accessed.

The FTMDA can rollback to access the full and

complete availability of data.

• Upgrade Reversion: not all aspects of

application fixes, patches or upgrades are

desirable in terms of features or even

application stability. A temporary session

rollback to when the desired functionality was

available can be provided by the FTMDA for

that user.

4 CONCLUSIONS

With the higher Temporal Application Effectiveness

of the Full Temporal Meta-Data Application, there is

a greater ongoing continuity of system access and

usage, and thus a greater potential for minimising

the cost of maintaining that application due to the

greater operational stability and seemingly static

nature of an operating application within that period.

The ready availability of historical data and

access, reduces information turnaround times, and

minimises maintenance costs of separate historical

environments. High costs that are typically incurred

due to major (and even some minor) upgrades or

generational changes, both in real financial terms as

well as potential accessibility disruption until the

revision system has been bedded down and is

operating effectively, can be greatly reduced due to

the automated update capability of the meta-data EIS

application as well as the full temporal rollback

capability for data and application logic, if required.

The very nature of the meta-data EIS application

further acts to greatly reduce these upgrade costs as

the update of meta-data and any upgrade of the

runtime engine is relatively seamless and incur only

minor migration downtimes (if any).

Adding the temporal meta-data management to

temporal data management provides a key benefit to

the implementation of meta-data EIS applications

over traditional code based EIS applications.

Combined with the additional benefits of meta-data

EIS applications they provide a significant

opportunity for lifecycle savings as well as

previously unexperienced end user flexibility and

interaction that cannot otherwise be readily

provided.

REFERENCES

Gregersen, H., Jensen, C., 1999. Temporal Entity-

Relationship Models – A Survey. In IEEE

Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering.

May/June 1999, Vol 11, No.3.

Wrembel, R., Bartosz, B., 2007. Metadata Management in

a Multiversion Data Warehouse. In Journal on Data

Semantics VIII, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg.

De Alwis, B., Sillito, J., 2009. Why are software projects

moving from centralized to decentralized version

control systems ? In CHASE ’09 Proceedings of the

2009 ICSE Workshop on Cooperative and Human

Aspects on Software Engineering. 2009.

Ren, Y., Xing, T., Quan, Q., Zhao, Y., 2010. Software

Configuration Management of Version Control Study

Based on Baseline. In Proceedings of 3

International

Conference on Information Management, Innovation

Management and Industrial Engineering. Nov 2010.

Vol 4. Pp118-.

Kaur, P., Singh, H., 2009. Version Management and

Composition of Software Components in Different

Phases of the Software Development Life Cycle. In

ACM Sigsoft Software Engineering Notes, Jul 2009.

Vol 34. Iss 4. Pp493-.

Schmidt, D., 2006. Introduction Model-Driven

Engineering. In IEEE Computer Science, Feb 2006,

Vol 39, No.2, pp25-31.

Davis, J., Tierney, A., Chang, E., 2004. Meta-data

framework for EIS specification, In 6th International

Conference on Enterprise Information Systems, Porto,

Portugal, April 2004.

Chang, E., Davis, J., Chalup, S., 2003. A new look at EIS

life cycle – introducing the concept of generational

change. In Proceedings of the 5th International

Conference on Enterprise Information Systems,

France, May 2003.

Zarras, A., 2008. Applying Model-Driven Architecture to

Achieve Distribution Transparencies. In Information

and Software Technology, July 2006, Vol 48, Issue 7,

pp498-516.

Davis, J., Tierney, A., Chang, E., 2005. A User Adaptable

User Interface Model to Support Ubiquitous User

Access to EIS Style Applications. In Proceedings of

the 28th International Conference on Computer

Software and Applications, Edinburgh, Scotland, July

2005.

Davis, J., Tierney, A., Chang, E., 2005. Merging

Application Models in a MDA Based Runtime

Environment for Enterprise Information Systems. In

Proceedings of the 3rd International IEEE Conference

on Industrial Infomatics, Perth, Australia, August

2005.

TEMPORAL META-DATA MANAGEMENT FOR MODEL DRIVEN APPLICATIONS - Provides Full Temporal

Execution Capabilities throughout the Meta-data EIS Application Lifecycle

379