O2 Technology

The primary objective of DEADA (ESPRIT 22933) is the production of a development environment for DBS applications based on the document centred approach and OO paradigms, covering the design, the construction and the operational phases, and dealing with challenges posed by open systems, performance, and interoperability of distributed heterogeneous DB systems.

This DEADA's development environment will be the end result of the project, and it will be composed of the appropriate componentware for each of the software process phases : - Coverage of the Application Design Phase, by approaching the definition of business requirements, the definition of document objects and the implied workflow circuits, and the definition of data model; - Coverage of the Construction Phase, by developing a set of tools to implement : the OO document approach, security and audits rules enforcement, maintenance of information, easy integration with legacy systems, fully integration with the design, and workflow management; - Coverage of the Construction Phase, by developing a set of components to perform monitoring in a distributed environment, to visualise the system behaviour, and to perform system administration. The technical approach is the development of a set of IT components interoperating on different platforms, DBMSs, and networks. The architectural model to be followed will be a client/server one. In order to meet the objectives, the consortium includes: - two representative users such as SOLLAC (metallurgy group) and IMAS (Barcelona City Council health-care organisation) aiming at downsizing their applications through client/server models. Both are huge companies with strong IS needs and will be in charge of providing user requirements and developing applications pilots with the DEADA technology. - Centro de Cálculo de Sabadell (CSS, a leading software engineering company located in Spain) as main industrial supplier. CSS must update its basic DB application development software in order to cope with new technologies and to meet the demand of its 12,000 customers. - O2 Technology (O2 T) as a developing SME mainly responsible for the document oriented TP monitor, providing technology in the OODB Management, - University of Lancaster as a research partner mainly in charge of a requirements analyser. The business impact of using this integrated environment is represented by a significant increase in software development productivity, quality of the final product and end-user satisfaction, and a major decrease of the maintenance costs. Other impacts of DEADA will be a lower time-to-market and payback-period of company products, and a greater adaptation of developers to changes. DEADA will offer interesting opportunities to new markets and products and it will benefit both the EU software developing community and the end users having a medium to large IS infrastructure. The technology will be marketed in the EU by the CCS group. DEADA will be of great value for CCS since it will allow CCS to enter the rightsizing market, and will deliver competitive advantage to its core business, i.e. the DB applications market. Moreover, the involvement of EU users in the project and the foreseen commercial agreement with O2 represent additional assets. DEADA will disseminate its results through workshops, the publication of papers, and the organisation of a partner network.

LINES will develop telematics to support central and local administration for the European transnational exchanges between universities, colleges and schools in the SOCRATES Programme. The project will use existing but fully up-to-date technology for maximum cost-effectiveness. With support from the World Wide Web and the Internet, it will be possible to track student progress for credit transfer purposes, supply information about educational establishments, and allow easy access to distance learning. Student and staff mobility, as well as life-long learning, will be substantially boosted as a result. The service will be demonstrated with 50 higher education institutions across Europe involving some 300 users.

The objective of the LINES project is to develop a telematics application which will satisfy an urgent need for administrative and practical support of transnational educational exchanges on institutional, national and European level. The application will be based on the latest of existing technology in order to reduce development costs and to ensure maximum cost-effectiveness. The aim is to provide a World Wide Web/INTERNET facility based on a distributed database concept that: records student progress - new, current and past - and curriculum for each student within a European Credit Transfer System framework; provides multi-media information for staff and student CVs, institution profiles and notice boards; provides financial accounting and demonstrates the way towards easy access distance learning. The project outcome will thus not only support student and staff mobility, but also the concept of life-long learning. The main partners of the project are Växjö University (SE), Cardiff Institute of Higher Education (GB), O2 Technology (FR), Artisan Konsult (SE) and the BUSINET network (BE). Aarhus Business College (DK) and TEI Athens (GR) will be subcontracted to perform extensive, external testing and assistance. The verification stage will involve some 30 users, the demonstration phase approximately 50 institutions and at least 300 regular users. The result of the project will be a comprehensive software package to support, in the first instance, the operation and management of student exchanges under the ERASMUS chapter of the SOCRATES Programme. The application will, however, be applicable to all types of exchanges on all levels of education and training, for instance within the COMENIUS and LEONARDO programmes. The package should require a minimum of investment in equipment and be available at such a reasonable cost that even smaller institutions can afford it.

The objective of the project is to develop an integrated technology base enabling multimedia applications to be designed from existing business and administrative systems. In particular, the SYNDAMMA project will develop a migration path from relational database to Object Oriented systems that are specially suitable for multimedia objects..

SYNDAMMA will provide both a toolset and a methodology. The methodology is aimed at supporting designers in incorporating multimedia dimensions in existing applications, including support to the Relational/Object mapping process. The toolset will support the developer in creating interactive multimedia applications either from scratch or from existing applications (based on relational database management systems and SQL embedded in COBOL or C source programs) migrating and extending them with multimedia capabilities. The SYNDAMMA methodology is an extension of what Waters names "Abstraction and Re-Implementation". It has been further decomposed and multimedia requirements capture and implementation has been added. The toolkit objectives are: - to provide a reverse engineering environment capable of producing and archiving design material from existing application sources. This environment will be capable of retrieving both the functional structure of the application and its data schemas. - to integrate the reverse engineering environment with a forward engineering environment to support the design and development of Object Oriented multimedia application by exploiting the knowledge base acquired during the reengineering phase. - to provide an environment capable of migrating old database data to the new designed Object Oriented database. In addition, the opportunity for a pilot application related to the economic database deployed by several public organisations across Europe will be studied and most likely implemented in a later phase of the project.

The IRO-DB project intends to develop a set of tools to achieve interoperability of pre-existing databases and new object-oriented databases. It will concentrate on providing a C++ library to access heterogeneous databases supported by communication protocols to exchange object-oriented SQL commands and objects.

This library will be an extension of the object-oriented world of evolving (de facto) standards, ie, the Call Level Interface of the SQL Access Group. Furthermore, tools to design and dynamically maintain integrated applications on large federations of heterogeneous databases will also be developed. Together, the developed tools will constitute a Federated Object-Oriented Database Systems mediating between heterogeneous databases and integrated applications. They will provide uniform C++ interfaces on top of dynamically adaptable integrated schemas for data exchange and sharing, global transaction management and concurrency control, without violating the autonomy of the participating databases. The first phase of the project will be devoted to developing a simplified version of the system for querying distributed relations and classes with mono-valued attributes and references on the basis of export schemas. The object interchange protocol will be designed as an object-oriented specialisation of the generic remote database access (RDA) standard, considering the format and protocol (FAP) proposed specialisation of the SQL Access Group. It will support, in addition to the main features of the already available specialisation of RDA for relational databases (SQL RDQ), classes of complex objects possibly interrelated using object identifiers, and generalisation hierarchies. To support this protocol (called OORDA) operationally, communication software and procedures for interfacing local databases will be implemented on top of INGRES and MATISSE. On top of the OORDA protocol, a C++ library, and a first version of a schema integrator with a query translator will be provided as attractive tools to develop object-oriented applications using existing DBMSs. The second phase will mainly extend the tools developed in the first phase and interconnect other database servers (O2, ONTOS). The OORDA protocol will be extended with a rich set of type constructors, behaviour encapsulation, update and facilities to maintain atomic and concurrent transactions. The schema integrator will be extended to incrementally and co-operatively design and maintain integrated schemas for multiple groups of users. More powerful mapping facilities between local database schemas and export schemas will also be integrated in the system. Integrated schemas will be operationally supported by a more sophisticated interoperable object manager, providing for processing optimised queries over multiple sites and for global transaction management and concurrency controls. One of the main results of the project will be the provision of an easy path for integrating the relational database technology to the new object-oriented one. Thus, most existing applications willing to interoperate with existing databases and object-oriented approaches should benefit from the project. Within this project, a demonstrator will be built to evaluate the system using an engineering application. The application will be abstracted from an existing one at INTRACOM, the major telecommunication company in Greece. It will integrate an existing CIMr database running on INGRES with an SQL production database and an abstraction of a CAD database developed on top of an object-oriented system (in principle, MATISSE). Further investigations of applications, notably in the banking domain, will be done by project partners (IBERMATICA in particular). Due to its layered design and its strong orientation towards evolving standards, the project will also result in two software products. These are a remote database access link for programming object-oriented applications in C++ on top of various database systems using a call level interface extending the CLI interface promoted by the SQL Access Group, and a schema integration and query translation tool for developing and maintaining interoperable applications on pre-existing heterogeneous databases. The participants in the consortium, which are mainly DBMS providers and software developers, will all make special efforts to exploit the resulting products, both as independent tools and as components integrated within applications.

The IRO-DB project intends to develop a set of tools to achieve interoperability of pre-existing databases and new object-oriented databases. It will concentrate on providing a C++ library to access heterogeneous databases supported by communication protocols to exchange object-oriented SQL commands and objects.

This library will be an extension of the object-oriented world of evolving (de facto) standards, ie, the Call Level Interface of the SQL Access Group. Furthermore, tools to design and dynamically maintain integrated applications on large federations of heterogeneous databases will also be developed. Together, the developed tools will constitute a Federated Object-Oriented Database Systems mediating between heterogeneous databases and integrated applications. They will provide uniform C++ interfaces on top of dynamically adaptable integrated schemas for data exchange and sharing, global transaction management and concurrency control, without violating the autonomy of the participating databases. The first phase of the project will be devoted to developing a simplified version of the system for querying distributed relations and classes with mono-valued attributes and references on the basis of export schemas. The object interchange protocol will be designed as an object-oriented specialisation of the generic remote database access (RDA) standard, considering the format and protocol (FAP) proposed specialisation of the SQL Access Group. It will support, in addition to the main features of the already available specialisation of RDA for relational databases (SQL RDQ), classes of complex objects possibly interrelated using object identifiers, and generalisation hierarchies. To support this protocol (called OORDA) operationally, communication software and procedures for interfacing local databases will be implemented on top of INGRES and MATISSE. On top of the OORDA protocol, a C++ library, and a first version of a schema integrator with a query translator will be provided as attractive tools to develop object-oriented applications using existing DBMSs. The second phase will mainly extend the tools developed in the first phase and interconnect other database servers (O2, ONTOS). The OORDA protocol will be extended with a rich set of type constructors, behaviour encapsulation, update and facilities to maintain atomic and concurrent transactions. The schema integrator will be extended to incrementally and co-operatively design and maintain integrated schemas for multiple groups of users. More powerful mapping facilities between local database schemas and export schemas will also be integrated in the system. Integrated schemas will be operationally supported by a more sophisticated interoperable object manager, providing for processing optimised queries over multiple sites and for global transaction management and concurrency controls. One of the main results of the project will be the provision of an easy path for integrating the relational database technology to the new object-oriented one. Thus, most existing applications willing to interoperate with existing databases and object-oriented approaches should benefit from the project. Within this project, a demonstrator will be built to evaluate the system using an engineering application. The application will be abstracted from an existing one at INTRACOM, the major telecommunication company in Greece. It will integrate an existing CIMr database running on INGRES with an SQL production database and an abstraction of a CAD database developed on top of an object-oriented system (in principle, MATISSE). Further investigations of applications, notably in the banking domain, will be done by project partners (IBERMATICA in particular). Due to its layered design and its strong orientation towards evolving standards, the project will also result in two software products. These are a remote database access link for programming object-oriented applications in C++ on top of various database systems using a call level interface extending the CLI interface promoted by the SQL Access Group, and a schema integration and query translation tool for developing and maintaining interoperable applications on pre-existing heterogeneous databases. The participants in the consortium, which are mainly DBMS providers and software developers, will all make special efforts to exploit the resulting products, both as independent tools and as components integrated within applications.