20. VLDB 1994: Santiago de Chile, Chile - Tutorials
1. Geographic Information Systems
Geographic Information Systems -GIS- are systems that manage a special
class of data, georeferenced data. This term refers to data that
deal with geographic phenomena associated with their location, spatially
referenced to the Earth. GIS support a wide range of application
domains, such as urban planning, natural resources administration,
agriculture, public utility network management, route optimization,
demography, cartography, coastal monitoring, fire and epidemics control.
In most domains, GIS play a major role as a decision support tool
for planning activities. Also, GIS present a challenge to database
researchers. Data to be integrated into GIS come in distinct formats,
as well as from different sources and geographic locations, being
captured in varying periods of time by several types of devices.
Their processing involves considerable amounts of space and requires
specialized operations, not available in commercial database systems. In
order to efficiently support GIS applications, database systems must be
built to provide users with new storage, management and presentation
facilities.
The purpose of the tutorial is to review the state-of-the-art in database
support for GIS and outline some of the research issues currently being
addressed in the development of these systems, both from end-users and
from database designers' standpoints. The content of the tutorial
includes data models, I/O processing, data management and retrieval, and
data storage and spatial access methods. The tutorial will also discuss
various approaches to developing applications for GIS, analyzing current
tendencies and some open issues.
Presentation: The course will be presented in Spanish. The
transparencies will be in English, which will help the simultaneous
translation process.
Dr. Medeiros is senior assistant professor of CS at the Universidade
Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP), Brazil. She is currently the principal
investigator of a research project on developing GIS for environmental
control applications for an object oriented platform. Dr. Medeiros
took her electronic engineering degree in 1976 and her MSc degree in
Informatics in 1979 from the Pontificia Universidade Catolica, PUC/RJ,
Brazil. Her PhD degree was obtained from the University of Waterloo,
Canada, in 1985 and her Livre Docencia (in databases) from UNICAMP
in 1992. She has held visiting appointments at INRIA (Rocquencourt),
France, and at the Universite Paris-Dauphine, Paris, France. She is
an author or co-author of about 30 papers on databases and software
engineering methodologies. Presently she is the Editor of the Journal of
the Brazilian CS Society.
2. Persistent Programming Systems: The Future of Databases?
The successful uses of databases has been based on the notion that their
is a strict methodology for their construction. Firstly, the form of
the data (the schema) is defined, then the database is populated (with
values) and then programs (queries) are written to access and manipulate
the data. The combination of modern applications together with the need
to store highly structured and complex data in the database questions
the wisdom of constructing database systems in such an inflexible manner.
The longevity of the data means that the accretion of meta-data, data
and programs is almost uniform and that mechanisms are required to
consistently control their evolution. The notion that the meta-data
is more fixed than the data, which in turn is more fixed than the
queries is being challenged. The complexity of the data also means that
abstraction mechanisms are required to control the modelling and uses of
all the information in the database. Persistent programming research
has for some time concentrated in integrating the concepts of both
programming languages and databases. This tutorial will review the state
of persistent programming systems in relation to the manner in which they
control the complexity of building long-lived, data-intensive application
systems taking the approach that meta-data, data and programs have
equal status. Two principles must be combined to control complexity:
uniformity and incrementality. For applications to attain significant
longevity they must avoid ossification. Incremental evolution and
accretion of meta-data, data and program must be an integral part of the
system design and operating specification. There is always a number of
trade-offs to be made between the safety and performance of early binding
and the flexibility of dynamic binding. The economics of change dominate
the design of these modern application systems. The tutorial will review
the approaches to uniformity and incrementality available to persistent
application system designers. A liberal use of examples will be used to
illustrate the concepts. It will also include a new technique for of
programming called hyper-programming which is only possible in integrated
persistent systems.
Malcolm Atkinson obtained his first degree from the University of
Cambridge in 1966, followed by a Diploma in CS in 1967. After
three years research and teaching at Lancaster University he returned
to Cambridge and was awarded his PhD in 1974. He then held academic
posts in Burma, Cambridge, East Anglia and Edinburgh, being appointed
to a senior lectureship at Edinburgh in 1983. He was a visiting
professor at the Univ. of Pennsylvania during 1983-84 and was appointed
to a professorship in CS at Glasgow Univ. in 1984. He was head
of Dept. of Computing Science from 1986 to 1990, following which he
spent nine months on sabbatical at INRIA near Paris working with the O2
group. He has extensive experience of industrial consultancy including a
long association with ICL and, more recently, with Perihelion Software.
Atkinson's main research interest is in persistent programming languages,
investigating the relationship between programming languages and database
systems. He has held a number of research grants awarded by the UK SERC,
in particular a project on Bulk Data Types, and has lead several research
projects (see below).
Instructor: Ronald Morrison, U. of St. Andrews, UK
Ron Morrison is Professor of Software Engineering at the Univ. of
St Andrews. He gained a BSc in Mathematics from the Univ. of
Strathclyde in 1967, a Diploma and a MSc in CS from the Univ. of
Glasgow in 1968 and 1970 respectively, and a PhD from the Univ. of
St Andrews in 1979. His special interests are programming language
design, persistent object systems and operating systems. Over the past
14 years he has worked extensively with Professor Atkinson of Glasgow
University on the integrating technology called Persistent Programming.
The work has been funded by STC Technology Ltd., SERC and, more recently,
ESPRIT. He was one of the major designers and implementors of the
persistent programming language PS-algol and led the team that designed
and implemented Napier88. Ron Morrison has also co-chaired workshops in
the Database Programming Language Series.
Professors Atkinson and Morrison were leaders of the Alvey/SERC funded
PISA project (Persistent Information Space Architectures) and are main
researchers of the ESPRIT III BRA 6903 Fide2 project on Database
Programming Languages in collaboration with colleagues in France, Germany
and Italy. Together with Professor Buneman, they also founded the series
of International Workshop on Persistent Object Systems in 1983.
3. Parallelism in Database Systems
Manipulating large (terabyte and petabyte) databases requires the
database system to execute the operation in parallel using multiple
processors, disks, and tapes concurrently. Many commercial systems offer
mechanisms to do this. The first lecture explores the concepts and
algorithms inside most parallel database systems. The second lecture
describes the specific techniques used by commercially available (or
promised) systems.
Concepts and techniques: The technology imperative for parallelism.
Kinds of parallelism (pipeline, partition). Success metrics: speedup,
batch scaleup, transaction scaleup. Data parallelism: partitioning
schemes. Operation parallelism: streams and rivers. Specific
operators: scan, aggregate, sort, join. Utility operations (load,
backup/restore/recover, index, reorganize, verify). Optimization of
parallel operations.
Techniques used by specific systems (based on public information):
Teradata, Tandem, Informix, Rdb/DBI, DB2, Oracle, Sybase.
Instructor: Jim Gray,
Digital Equipment Corporation, USA
Dr. Gray is a specialist in database, transaction processing, and
dependable computer systems. He founded Digital's San Francisco Systems
Center where he is working on enhancements to Digital's commercial
systems. These efforts center on the use of parallelism to process
very large databases. He worked on Tandem's NonStop SQL and IBM's
System R, SQL/DS, DB2, and IMS-Fast Path. He is an editor-in-chief of
the VLDB journal and editor of the Performance Handbook for Database
and Transaction Processing Systems, coauthor of Transaction Processing
Concepts and Techniques, and editor of Morgan Kaufmann's Data Management
Series. He is active in the National Research Council, and holds
doctorates from Berkeley and Stutgart.
4. Interoperability in Multidatabase Systems
One of the most important and challenging problems of the 1990s is
to provide techniques and mechanisms to support the interoperation and
networking of database and knowledge base systems. Such systems
have proliferated throughout organizations, based upon a variety
of general-purpose database management technology, or constructed as
data-intensive systems tailored to different application domains. It
is critical to support the sharing and exchange of information among
these database systems, while retaining as much as possible of the
investment in the individual existing systems and their associated
application software. This tutorial examines the problems, principles,
techniques, and mechanisms to support the controlled sharing and exchange
of information among a collection of data/knowledge base systems. We
specifically examine the problem of database system interoperability
from both data and application viewpoints. This balanced view should
benefit both industrial practitioners (including strategic planners and
decision makers, systems analysts/integrators, data modelers) as well
as applied researchers in the area of database systems and application
interoperability.
The first part presents a framework for database system interoperability.
The key problems and issues in the networking and interoperation
of database systems are described. Approaches to interoperation
are reviewed, including: (enterprise-wide) integration; logically
centralized, physically distributed databases; multi-model database
systems, and federated database systems. A historical perspective is
provided, stressing key research and development achievements as well as
open problems. A viewpoint on the sharing and exchange of information
among a collection of heterogeneous, autonomous database systems is
presented. Federated databases and related architectural approaches are
described. Relationships between sharing and exchange at the database
system level with those at the network and operating system levels are
considered.
The second part presents an application perspective. First, Multisystem
Workflow Management. Many activities involve performing operations
(workflows) on multiple independent systems. Workflows involve
specification and support of dependencies among operations performed
by different systems and databases. We will discuss interoperability
requirements and applications of recent relaxed transaction models
with an example industrial telecommunication multisystem application and
prototype. Second, Multidatabase Consistency Constraints Management.
Consistency of corporate data, even when it is managed by multiple
systems, is an important requirement and a major business problem.
We will discuss issues of specifying and enforcing consistency of
interrelated data stored in multiple databases. Examples from industrial
application systems will be discussed.
Instructor: Dennis McLeod,
University of Southern California, USA
Dennis McLeod received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in CS from
MIT in 1974, 1976, and 1978 (respectively). He joined the faculty of
the Univ. of Southern California in 1978, where he is currently full
professor in CS. His main research interests include: database system
modeling, design, and evolution; database system interoperability and
networking; information protection and security; knowledge management;
applied machine learning; personal information management systems; and
information management environments for digital libraries, scientific
and engineering data, computer-integrated manufacturing, and computer-
supported cooperative work. Dr. McLeod has over ninety refereed
publications in the above areas and he is particularly noted for his
work on semantic data modeling and federated databases. He has lectured
widely on an international basis, and has served as an advisor and
consultant to a variety of private and public sector organizations. Dr.
McLeod has served as chair and member of program and organizational
committees for numerous conferences and workshops, and is currently an
editor of the Int. Journal on Very Large Databases, Int. Journal on
Intelligent and Cooperative Information Systems, Comm. of the ACM, as
well as other publications.
Instructor: Amit P. Sheth,
Bell Communications Research, USA
Dr. Amit P. Sheth has led projects on developing a heterogeneous
distributed database system, a factory information system, integration of
AI-database systems, transactional workflows, federated database tools,
multidatabase consistency, and data quality. His current interests also
include semantic heterogeneity and information brokering in the emerging
Infocosm. He is an ACM lecturer, has presented eleven tutorials
and participated in several panels at major conferences, given over
forty invited talks in many countries, and has authored over sixty
publications. He is serving on the editorial boards of four journals,
and has served as the general chair of the First Int. Conf. on Parallel
and Distributed Information Systems (PDIS) and a program (co-)chair of
the International Workshop on Interoperability in Multidatabase Systems,
and currently is a program (co-)chair of the Third PDIS. Prior to joining
Bellcore in 1989, he was a Principal/Staff Scientist at Honeywell and
Unisys research centers.
5. Object Database Management: Database Design and Open Systems
Object database management systems are providing the data management
solution for applications in computer integrated manufacturing, office
information systems, and multimedia. This tutorial presents the
concepts involved in designing object-oriented database applications, and
a discussion of issues involved in the design of object-oriented database
management systems. In particular, the first part is an overview of
OO data modeling concepts and shows how they can be used to design
database applications. Emphasis will be on designing both the database
structure and the operations (methods) of the application. The OO
approach will be compared with traditional conceptual database design
that uses Extended Entity-Relationship Modeling. We will also show how
a conceptual object-oriented design can be implemented on relational and
object-oriented database systems.
The final part is an overview of the concepts and issues involved
in the design of open object DBMSs including object-relational DBMSs.
Topics to be covered include a comparison of object DBMS approaches
including persistent programming languages, extended relational DBMSs,
and object-relational DBMSs; selected system design issues including
persistence models, object query processing, storage management, version
models, and schema evolution; and a discussion of some of the challenges
in building object-relational DBMSs.
Presentation: The course will be presented in Spanish. The
transparencies will be in English, which will help the simultaneous
translation process.
Instructor: José A. Blakeley,
Texas Instruments, USA
Jose A. Blakeley is a member of the technical staff at Texas Instruments'
Systems and Information Sciences Laboratory, where he is co-principal
investigator of the Open OODB project (Phase II). He received a computer
systems engineering degree from Instituto Tecnologico y de Estudios
Superiores de Monterrey, Mexico, in 1978, and his M.Math. and
Ph.D. in CS from the University of Waterloo, Canada in 1983 and
1987, respectively. Blakeley's research interests include extensible
and object-oriented database management systems; object services
architectures; query language design, optimization, and execution; and
materialized view support. Blakeley is an Associate Editor of the ACM
Sigmod Record.
Instructor: Ramez Elmasri, U. of Texas at Arlington, USA
Ramez Elmasri is a faculty member at the University of Texas at Arlington
since 1990 in the CS and Engineering Department. He has been involved
with database research and teaching for over 15 years. He is well
known for his research on conceptual data modeling, query languages
and user interfaces, schema integration for multi-database systems,
and distributed databases. His recent research is on object-oriented
modeling and temporal databases. Elmasri is co-author with S.Navathe
of the bestselling textbook ``Fundamentals of Databases Systems" (Second
Edition 1994, Benjamin/Cummings Publishing Company and Addison-Wesley
International). He holds M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in CS from Stanford
University. He has worked for Honeywell and University of Houston prior
to his current position, and is a consultant for numerous organizations.
He has published over 50 research papers.
6. Indexing Multimedia Databases
The tutorial surveys state-of-the-art methods for storing and retrieving
multimedia data from large databases. Records (= documents) may consist
of formatted fields, text, images, voice, animation etc. A sample query
that we would like to support is `in a collection of 2-d color images,
find images that are similar to a sunset photograph'. For text and
formatted fields, several methods have been proposed and studied; the
tutorial classifies these methods systematically, examines in detail the
main representatives of each class, and highlights the environ- ment
that each method is most suitable for. Indexing for images and other
media is a new, active area of research; the tutorial will present
recent approaches and prototype systems, for 2-d and 3-d medical image
databases, 2-d color image databases, and 1-d time series databases. The
content of the tutorial includes access methods for multi-dimensional
points, access methods for text, indexing methods for images, time series
and signals, in general.
Instructor: Christos Faloutsos,
U. of Maryland at College Park, USA
Christos Faloutsos received the B.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering
(1981) from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece and the
M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in CS from the University of Toronto, Canada.
Since 1985 he has been with the department of CS at University of
Maryland, College Park, where he is currently an associate professor.
In 1989 he received the Presidential Young Investigator Award by the
NSF. His research interests include physical data base design, searching
methods for text, geographic information systems and indexing methods for
medical and multimedia databases.
Copyright © Fri Mar 12 17:22:53 2010
by Michael Ley (ley@uni-trier.de)
