MANAGING COMPLEX INFORMATION IN REACTIVE

APPLICATIONS USING AN ACTIVE TEMPORAL XML

DATABASE APPROACH

Essam Mansour, Kudakwashe Dube and Bing Wu

School of Computing, Dublin Institute of Technology, Kevin Street, Dublin 8, Ireland

Keywords: Information management, XML, ECA rule paradigm, active database, and temporal database.

Abstract: Tasks, such as those in patient care practice, require constant monitoring of a dynamic context and

environment based on best practices in the form of predefined experience-based information or knowledge.

These applications could take the form of reactive applications. The problem of incorporating best practices

into routines used in such tasks requires advanced approaches and methods for comprehensively managing

complex information. This paper presents a generic and unified framework for Complex Information

Management (CIM) in domains where best practices need to be incorporated into day-to-day work. The

CIM framework is supported by a high level declarative language, called AIM. The approach adopted here

uses the combined application of the event-condition-action (ECA) rule paradigm, a temporal mechanism,

advanced DBMS features and XML technologies. Furthermore, the paper also presents the conceptual

architecture for the complex information management system, AIMS. The main contribution of CIM

framework and approach lays in managing the complex information by introducing multiple management

planes under a unified framework.

1 INTRODUCTION

Reactive applications have the ability to process

events of interest to domain entities. They can

respond to changing situations by issuing alerts,

reminders, requests, and/or observations to users.

The information and knowledge used in guiding the

reactive aspect of applications usually exist in

generic forms as best practice, experience, policies

and operational rules that guide decisions and

actions. This information and knowledge require

formalisation to be incorporated into reactive

applications. Later, they need to be customized and

instantiated to suit the condition or situation in the

domain. The result of the customization and

instantiation process is what we refer to, in this

work, as complex information. This will be made up

of situation-specific, dynamic information and

knowledge that represent the best practice in the

domain. It further forms the basis of the reactive

behaviour that monitors occurrences of relevant

situations in the domain. Examples of this type of

complex information include: the medical patient

plan in the intensive care applications; the customer

order in securities trading; and the customer banking

alerts scenario. The medical patient plan monitors

specific clinical data items and responds to the

changes of these data items with respect to specific

patient according to customized reactive behaviour

based on the clinical guidelines. The security order

deals with particular stock items, to them a set of

constrains and conditions are applied. These

constrains are subject to modification according to

the customer’s experience as response to the stock

items changes, until the security order is executed or

cancelled.

A major challenge in reactive applications is to

provide a unified framework in which the complex

information can be managed as one body in such a

way that the formalisation, specification, execution,

manipulation and query dimensions are explicitly

provided as first class elements under one roof

within the framework.

In the area of active database, managing reactive

aspects of applications is addressed at the level of

rules and triggers, such as in (Umeshwar et al. 1988;

Widom and Ceri 1996; Paton and Diaz 1999;

Bonifati et al. 2002), not at the level of a unified

520

Mansour E., Dube K. and Wu B. (2007).

MANAGING COMPLEX INFORMATION IN REACTIVE APPLICATIONS USING AN ACTIVE TEMPORAL XML DATABASE APPROACH.

In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - DISI, pages 520-523

DOI: 10.5220/0002385005200523

 SciTePress

body of complex information. Consider, as an

example, the users of securities trading and intensive

care applications demand computerized support for

managing dynamic orders and medical patient plans,

respectively, instead of individual rules and triggers.

Existing support for reactive applications suffer

from lack of support for queries and manipulation.

Furthermore, problems of unexpected interactions

among the individual rules become more likely with

the growing of the rule base (Umeshwar et al. 1988).

This paper presents on-going research (Dube

and Wu 2001; Wu and Dube 2001; Wu and Dube

2001; Dube et al. 2002; Dube et al. 2002; Dube

2004; Dube et al. 2005; Mansour et al. 2006). The

first stage of the research was aimed at providing a

generic Framework with a declarative language

PLAN (Wu and Dube 2001) for managing clinical

reactive applications based on Clinical Practice

Guidelines (CPGs). Also a prototype system TOPS

(Wu and Dube 2001; Dube 2004) was developed to

implement the PLAN framework and language. This

second stage focuses on investigating into a formal

complex information management model and

approach that: 1) is based on XML, 2) takes into

account temporal issues, 3) continue to exploit the

event-driven approach adopted in the previous stage;

and 3) allows advanced queries, replays of past

history and information mining.

2 FRAMEWORK AND

APPRAOCH

This section presents the framework for complex

information management and the adopted approach

to computerising the complex information.

2.1 The CIM Framework

The Complex Information Management (CIM)

framework supports the management of the complex

information in reactive applications. As illustrated in

Figure 1, the CIM framework contains three planes:

specification plane; instantiation and customization

plane and; management plane with the DBMS, XML

technologies and inter-plane communication as the

integrating factors. The DBMS provides support for

the ECA rule paradigm and the temporal

mechanism.

Com plex inform ation

Generation and

Installation

Instantiation and

Customization Plane

Instantiation and

Customization Plane

Specification PlaneSpecification Plane

Complex

Inform ation Kernel

Management Plane

Dissemination

DBMS and XML

Technologies

General

Specification

Query

Distribution

Manipulation

Execution

Figure 1: the Complex Information Management (CIM)

framework.

The complex information management

process is fitted into the three planes of the

framework, as follows:

1) Specification plane: Best practice in domains

for reactive applications is formalised and

translated into formal specifications and held

permanently in the database where they can be

managed easily.

2) Instantiation and customization plane: The

stored generic specifications are used to create

the Complex Information (CI).

3) Management plane: The installed CI is

managed. The plane provides support to

execute, manipulate, query, and disseminate the

CI. The distributed management for the CI

supports the mobility of the domain entities as

well as remote access to the information. An

engine based on the active database is utilized to

execute the CI. The CI is also subject to the

same manipulation operations, as the domain

information. The manipulation operations are

included in the behaviour of CI, or issued by the

domain users. The manipulation operations

facilitate the propagation of the changes from

the generic specification to the CI. The CI also

is subject to the same queries, as the domain

information, plus special query support, such as

replay CI. The replay functionality provides

ability to review the evolution of the CI.

An XML-based language, called AIM, is

developed to support the functionalities of the three

planes. AIM language consists of a model for the

complex information and two sub-languages, AIM-

SL and AIM-QL. AIM-SL and AIM-QL support the

functionalities of the specification plane and the

management plane, respectively. The model of CI

MANAGING COMPLEX INFORMATION IN REACTIVE APPLICATIONS USING AN ACTIVE TEMPORAL XML

DATABASE APPROACH

521

provides support to the instantiation and

customization plane. The approach adopted in

developing AIM language is presented in the next

subsection.

2.2 Active Temporal XML Approach

The Active Temporal XML approach utilizes the

combined application of the Event-Condition-Action

(ECA) rule paradigm, a temporal mechanism,

advanced DBMS features and XML technologies. A

map of the domains involved in this approach is

shown in Figure 2. Based on this approach, AIM

language is developed such that:

1) It is an XML based language and enjoys the

general benefits of XML.

2) It has an active XML-based specification

component language, called AIM-SL, which

utilizes the ECA rule paradigm to formalise and

specify the application best practice. The design

of AIM-SL is based on modularised XML

Schemas. This modularization provides

flexibility in modifying or enriching the AIM-

SL language to suit several application domains.

3) The complex information model is developed as

an active temporal XML document, which

includes the history of the CI and the rules that

represent the behaviour part of CI.

4) It has a high level XQuery-based component

language, AIM-QL, that provides support to:

a) Manipulate both the AIM-SL

speciation and the CI documents;

b) Query and replay the CI;

c) Provides temporal extensions to the

XQuery language to support the replay

functionality.

XML

ECA Rule

Paradigm

Tem poral

Database

Active

XML

Temporal

Trigger

Tem poral

XML

Active Tem poral

XML Database

active

Database

and

Figure 2: The active temporal XML database approach.

3 CONCEPTUAL

ARCHITECTURE

This section presents the conceptual architecture of

the AIM System (AIMS), whose development is

currently on-going. AIMS utilises the AIM language

to manage the complex information according to the

CIM framework.

XML

Schemas

XML Repository

- Domain Information

- AIM-SL Specification

- CI Document

CI Manager

- Specification

- Instantiation

- Execution

- Manipulation

- Query and Replay

Rule Manager

- Rule Execution

- Rule Manipulation

Communication Mana

- Dissemination method

- Distribution method

DBMS Trigger

Mechanism

Registration and

Manipulation

Modifications

Information Manager

- Validation method

- Temporal storage method

- Temporal query method

Information

AIM Language

Result

Figure 3: Conceptual architecture of AIMS.

A conceptual architecture of AIMS is presented in

Figure 3. The Complex Information (CI) manager

provides the high level management for the complex

information. CI manager provides support to specify

the application best practice, generate, execute,

manipulate, and query CI documents. The rule

manager provides for the execution of CI rules, their

manipulation and extension of the active mechanism

to support temporal rules. The information manager

extends an XML database system to provide

temporal support and utilizes an XML DBMS to

validate and store the AIM-SL specification and the

CI documents. The communication manager

supports the remote access and distributed

management to the AIM-SL specification and CI

documents. The AIM language is implemented in

the CI manager. AIMS is being implemented by

using DB2, java, and XML technologies, such as

XQuery and Web services.

AIMS avoids the unexpected interactions that

most likely appear with the growing of the rule base,

because:

1) The rules are modularised and joined to a

specific domain entity instead of specific

relation, such as table in the relational database,

and

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2) The rule manager is able to remove a set of rules

according to its objective or scope.

4 CONCLUSION

This paper has presented the Complex Information

Management (CIM) framework and approach, which

consists of three planes for specifying, customizing

and managing the complex information. The AIM

language that is developed to support the

functionalities of the CIM framework planes has

been briefly outlined. The framework also includes a

complex information model that enables easy

performance of information management functions.

The paper has also presented a conceptual

architecture for the AIMS system, which utilizes the

AIM language in managing the complex information

by following the CIM framework. The development

of the prototype system, AIMS, is currently in

progress. The CIM framework and approach are

unique in:

1) Computerizing the complex information as one

distinct entity that is easy to be specified,

executed, manipulated, queried and

disseminated using one language, AIM.

2) Allowing the complex information to be subject

to the same manipulation operations and

queries, as the domain information, plus special

operations and query functionality.

3) Utilizing the generally available highly

optimized and easily maintained technologies,

such as XML technologies and ECA rule

paradigm as incorporated in the modern DBMS,

to provide a tool that assists domain experts and

users in managing the complex information.

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