Research Report - 2001
Information Systems
Academic Staff
Prof Maria Orlowska
A/Prof Robert Colomb
Dr Xiaofang Zhou
Dr Xue Li
Ms Shazia Sadiq
Mr Ralf Muhlberger
Research Students
Mr John Gilmore
Ms Marta Indulska
Mr Ahmad Kayed
Ms Shamila Makki
Mr Paul O'Brien
Ms Shazia Sadiq
Mr Wasim Sadiq
Mr Andrew Smith
Mr David Truffet
Ms Hui Wang
Ms Xiao Yu Wang
Mr Andrew Devereux
Mr Karsten Schulz
Mr Charles Li
Mr Sham Prasher
Mr Kai Xu
Mr Xingzhi Sun
Contact Details
Prof Maria Orlowska
Email: maria@csee.uq.edu.au
Tel: 3365 2989
A/Prof Robert Colomb
Email: colomb@csee.uq.edu.au
Tel: 3365 1190
Dr Xiaofang Zhou
Email: zxf@csee.uq.edu.au
Tel: 3365 3248
Dr Xue Li
Email: xueli@csee.uq.edu.au
Tel: 3365 2379
The Information Systems group focuses on the following key research areas:
Human-Computer interfaces in distributed environments, and electronic commerce technologies
Information systems re-engineering
Workflows management systems
Data warehousing & data mining
The main research activities of this group are strongly associated with research at the Cooperative Research Centre for Distributed Systems Technology (DSTC) where a number of research staff and students are employed.
Human-Computer Interfaces in Distributed Environments
The general problem addressed by this group is how an information space presents itself to a user population and conversely how a user can interact with the space in order to satisfy information requirements. The information spaces of interest are quite general. Some of them are represented as structured databases, e.g., a student information system or large amounts of data resulting from simulations; some as semi-structured databases, e.g., databases originating in catalogues of museum collections or XML-marked-up documents; some as hypertext and some as text. The issues involved include methods of representing the semantic structure of the spaces, information structures which can assist a user in navigating the spaces, access protocols permitting remote access to the spaces, and software agents which can assist the user in information seeking tasks. Application domains include organizational informatics, including electronic commerce, and biological informatics.
KAYED, A. and COLOMB, R.M. (2001) "Re-engineering approach to building domain ontologies" First Asia-Pacific Conference on Web Intelligence, Maebashi City, Japan, October 23-26, 2001. Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (to appear).
COLOMB, R.M. (2002) Information Spaces: the architecture of cyberspace Springer (to appear).
COLOMB, R.M., DAMPNEY, C.N.G & JOHNSON, M. (2002) "Category-Theoretic Fibration as an Abstraction Mechanism in Information Systems" Acta Informatica (to appear)
COLOMB, R.M. (2001) "Why Do People Pay for Information?" Prometheus Vol 19, No. 1 45-53.
KAYED, A. and COLOMB, R.M. (2001) "Business-to-business Electronic Commerce: Electronic Tendering", in S.M. Rahman and R.J. Bignall (eds) Internet Commerce and Software Agents: Cases, Technologies and Opportunities Idea Group Publishing 231-250.
KAYED, A. and COLOMB, R.M. (2000) "Ontological and Conceptual Structures for Tendering Automation" International Conference on Information Systems: 2000 Brisbane, Australia 10-13 December 2000 1-8.
KAYED, A. and COLOMB, R.M. (2000) "Conceptual Structures for Tendering Ontology" The Second Workshop on AI in Electronic Commerce (AIEC 2000)Melbourne, Australia, August 2000 71-82.
CHEN, Y.-P. P. and COLOMB, R.M. (2000) "Querying Recursive Structures Without Recursive Queries" in Proc Australasian Database Conference Canberra, Australia 31 January – 2 February 2000 IEEE Computer Society 21-27.
METTER, M. and COLOMB, R.M. (2000) "WAP Enabling Existing HTML Applications" in Proc First Australasian User Interface Conference Canberra, Australia, 31 January – 2 February 2000 IEEE Computer Society 49-57.
Spatial Databases
Spatial data types such as points, line and polygons are used to describe the "location" aspect of data objects such as roads, land parcels and telephone poles and trenches. Spatial objects are typically much larger and spatial operations are more complex than their relational counterparts. With a huge amount of spatial data available nowadays, it is very challenging for a spatial database management system (DBMS) to meet the performance expectation set by a relational DBMS.
In this research project, we focus on the performance issues for very large spatial databases:
Query execution optimization for complex queries with multiplespatial and aspatial predicates.
Visual spatial query processing such that only the "right" level of details for the spatial objects to be viewed by a human user is retrieved from the database. This research is in the context of supporting spatial applications on the Internet.
Efficient processing for complex spatial operations such as spatial joins and polygon amalgamation operations for spatial data warehousing and spatial data mining applications.
Main techniques to be investigated include the exploration of rich semantic relationships among spatial operations, design of new spatial indexing mechanisms and parallel processing.
X. Zhou, D. Truffet and J. Han, "Efficient Polygon Amalgamation Methods for Spatial OLAP and Spatial Data Mining", Proceedings of the 6th International Symposium on Large Spatial Databases (SSD'99), pages 167 - 187, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 1651. July 1999, Hong Kong. Springer-Verlag.
D.Abel, V.Gaede, K.Taylor and X.Zhou, "SMART: Towards a Spatial Internet Marketplace", GeoInformatica 3:2, pp.141-164, June 1999.
D.Abel, V.Gaede, R.Power and X.Zhou, "Caching Strategies for Spatial Joins", GeoInformatica 3:1, pp.33-59, March 1999.
Data Warehousing
The general problem addressed is the selection of views which should be materialized in a data warehouse. The view selection decision has a direct impact on the quality of data used for decision support, as well as the efficiency and operational costs of the data warehouse. Additionally, the problem of spatial data warehouse design is also investigated. While the research in the spatial information systems has been extensive, spatial data warehouse design techniques received little attention. However, literature shows that an estimated 80% of data locked up in corporate databases has a geographic component. Therefore, spatial data warehouses can be used to help a business develop and maintain a competitive advantage through spatial market analysis and site selection.
M. Indulska, "Shared Result Identification for Materialized View Selection", Proceedings 11th Australian Database Conference, Canberra, 2000.
Liang, Li, Wang & Orlowska, "Making Multiple Views Self-Maintainable in a Data Warehouse", Data & Knowledge Engineering, 30, pp.121-134, 1999.
Wang, Orlowska & Liang, "Efficient Refreshment of Materialized Views with Multiple Sources", Proc 8th Int Conf on Information Knowledge & Management, CIDM'99, ACM Press, pp.375-382.
Developing a Method for Aggregating Spatial Data
A Geographical Information System (GIS) brings all types of data together based on the geographic component of data and provides simple point-and-click query capabilities as well as complex analysis tools. Querying a Geographical Information System, however, can be prohibitively expensive due to the large amounts of geographical data which may need to be processed. Since the use of GIS technology has grown dramatically in the past few years, there is now a need more than ever, to provide users with the fastest and least expensive query capabilities especially since an approximated 80% of data stored in corporate databases has a geographical component. The focus of this project is to develop an efficient method for aggregation of spatial data which will produce several levels of granularity of aggregations and allow users to specify the quality of data they require for their queries. This project, however, is not only applicable to GIS. The full benefits of using spatial data can be achieved by combining the data from different sources covering a common region. Many real life applications would substantially benefit from introducing spatial representations of the data, rather than the currently available textual references to the names and descriptions of the regions/sub-regions/sub-sub-regions. Data Warehousing in particular could benefit greatly from the introduction of spatial components with the ability of aggregation. This would allow the users of a data warehouse to 'visualise' the results of some of their analytical queries instead of viewing them in textual form.
M. Indulska, M. E. Orlowska "On Aggreagtion Issues in Spatial Data Management", submitted to ADC2002
Workflow Management Systems
The work in progress addresses time management in production workflows, dynamic modification of business processes and integrated data analysis for workflow systems.
DSTC FlowMake Project
In this project, we are carrying out fundamental research in the field of coordinative workflow modelling and verification. As an outcome of the research a workflow modelling and verification tool, FlowMake, has been developed. FlowMake supports a product independent process modelling language and facilitates automated verification of well-defined correctness criteria. The workflow applications build upon business processes that are generally quite complex and involve a large number of activities and associated coordination constraints. It is essential that a conceptual workflow model is properly define, analyzed, verified, and refined before being deployed in a workflows management system. Modelling inconsistencies and errors may lead to undesirable execution of some or all possible workflow instances. We have identified certain correctness criteria in workflow modelling that should and can be effectively verified to ensure consistent workflow specifications. The detection of these specification errors is computationally complex and requires the development of efficient algorithms. It is well understood, that in general, complete workflow verification is not tractable. However, FlowMake clearly illustrates that a limited verification of a workflow model is possible. FlowMake identifies areas where analysis and verification can be performed based on the information about process logic that is embedded in the workflow model, and implements solutions to support such verification capabilities. The extent of verification that can be applied to a workflow model depends on the clarity of the underlying modelling structures and information regarding business process logic that is embedded in the model. The FlowMake verification process makes use of this information to identify problems in the design and interactivity assists the designer in removing such inconsistencies by refining the model. An evaluation version of FlowMake is available for download at: http://www.dstc.edu.au/Downloads/
Wasim Sadiq and Maria E. Orlowska. Applying Graph Reduction Techniques for Identifying Structural Conflicts in Process Models. Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE'99), Heidelberg, Germany, 14-18 June 1999. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 1626. pp. 195-209. Springer-Verlag.
Wasim Sadiq and Maria E. Orlowska. On Capturing Process Requirements of Workflow Based Business Information Systems. Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Business Information Systems (BIS'99), Poznan, Poland, 14-16 April 1999. pp.195-209, Springer Verlag.
Time Management
Time is a fundamental concept of all workflow processes. The main objective of this project is to investigate the problem of management of time in workflow management systems. The completed work includes the comprehensive framework for time management in production workflows that includes:
identification, classification and formal modelling of temporal constraints including their visualisation;
time management during build-time including specification and verification of temporal constraints;
time management during workflow run-time including monitoring and dynamic verification of temporal constraints during workflow run-time and run time prediction and scheduling;
temporal support for exception handling and analysis of reactive scheduling and temporal support for dynamic structural modification of a workflow model.
Based on this framework, a workflow time management tool called FlowTime has been designed. Work in progress addresses temporal support for workflow interoperability.
Marjanovic, O. and Orlowska, M.E. "On Modeling and Verification of Temporal Constraints in Production Workflows", Knowledge and Information Systems, 1(2), May Springer-Verlag, 1999.
Marjanovic, O. and Orlowska, M.E., "Time Management in Dynamic Workflows", Proc. of the 2nd International Symposium on Cooperative Databases and Applications, CODAS'99, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer- Verlag, 1999.
Flex-EL Workflow Enabled Flexible Learning
The general problem addressed by this group is how to deploy workflow technology to support flexible learning. Our vision is to provide an innovative, workflow-based, fully flexible learning environment to deliver high education courses and degrees by:
relaxing enrolment time constraints,
removing predefined semester duration,
assisting with enforcement of academic prerequisites,
maintaining high-quality subject content,
providing flexible learning pathways,
supporting innovative learning strategies,
allowing individual time management during study,
encouraging true collaboration and work in groups,
providing access to personal teaching assistance and
providing effective resource management.
These research activities are associated with the Distributed Database Unit of DSTC.
Handling Dynamically Changing Workflow Processes
Workflow technology is currently being deployed in quite diverse domains. However, the element of change is present in some degree and form in almost all domains. A workflow implementation that does not support the process of change will not benefit the organization in the long run. Change can be manifested in different forms in workflow processes. This research essentially targets the three dimensions of change in workflow processes, as given below. In addition, work is underway to formulate a consistent change methodology that incorporates the combined methods of dynamism, adaptability and flexibility, thus providing a comprehensive framework for handling dynamically changing workflows.
Dynamism: The first dimension represents dynamism - which is the ability of the workflow process to change when the business process evolves. This evolution may be slight as for process improvements, or drastic as for process innovation or process reengineering. In any case, the assumption is that the workflow processes have pre-defined models, and business process change, causes these models to be changed. The biggest problem here is the handling of active workflow instances, which were initiated in the old model, but need to comply now with the new specification. The issue of compliance is rather a serious issue, since potentially thousands of active instances may be affected by a given process change. Achieving compliance for these affected instances may involve loss of work and therefore has to be carefully planned [SMO00]. A typical example of dynamic workflows can be found in university admissions. Consider a scenario of a large tertiary institute that processes thousands of admission applications every year. The procedure for application, review and acceptance is generally well defined and understood. Suppose that the office of postgraduate studies revises the admission procedure for postgraduate students, requiring all applicants to submit a statement of purpose together with their application for admission. To implement this change, there can be two options available; one is to flush all existing applications, and apply the change to new applications only. Thus all existing applications will continue to be processed according to the old process model. This requires the underlying workflow system to at least provide some version management support. The second, more challenging option to implement the change is to migrate to the new process. It may be decided that all applicants, existing and new, will be affected by the change. Thus all admission applications, which were initiated under the old rules, now have to migrate to the new process. This migration may involve addition of some transition workflow activities as well as rollback activities. Defining the migration strategy is a complex problem and has been the target of extensive research [Sad00a].
Adaptability: The second dimension of change is adaptability - which is the ability of the workflow processes to react to exceptional circumstances. These exceptional circumstances may or may not be foreseen, and generally would affect one or a few instances. Of course the handling of exceptions, which cannot be anticipated, is more complex. However, a large majority of exceptions can be anticipated and by capturing these exceptions, the adaptability of the workflow is promoted [Sad00b]. In fact, unless these exceptions are captured within the workflow model, their handling will continue to be done outside of the system, in the form of "system workarounds", the consequences of which may come in conflict with process goals. However the complete set of exceptions for a given process can never be captured, thus dealing with unanticipated (true) exceptions will always be an issue. Using the same example as before, we can consider dealing with an admission application for a student with a multi-disciplinary background. For example, a student with a background in microbiology may be applying for a degree in IT. The review of this application may require the services of an academic outside the offering department. This may be rare but, if captured within the process model, could be handled within the workflow system. Another example, which represents a true (unanticipated) exception, can be found in the employment workflow. An employment instance may have reached a stage where even the letter of intent has been issued. If at that time the organization issues a spending freeze, the active instances of the employment workflow will have to be dealt with, requiring rollback and/or compensation activities, even though the original employment workflow remains unchanged.
Flexibility: The third dimension is flexibility - which is the ability of the workflow process to execute on the basis of a loosely, or partially specified model, where the full specification of the model is made at runtime, and may be unique to each instance. Processes which depend on the presence of such flexibility for the satisfactory attainment of process goals can be found in many applications: A typical example of flexibility is healthcare, where patient admission procedures are predictable and repetitive, however, in-patient treatments are prescribed uniquely for each case, but none-the-less have to be coordinated and controlled. Another application is higher education, where students with diverse learning needs and styles are working towards a common goal (degree). Study paths taken by each student need to remain flexible to a large extent, at the same time providing study guidelines and enforcing course level constraints is necessary to ensure a certain quality of learning. Web content management is also characterized by flexible processes, where especially in large projects, every development suggests the need for an overall plan to provide the objectives, approvals, and strategy, as well as a flexible means of coordinating the combined efforts of the theme designers, graphic experts, programmers, and project planners. Effective Customer Relationship Management (CRM), a critical component in enterprise solutions, also signifies the need to provide a flexible means of composing call centre activities according to the available resources and data, by integrating CRM systems with core organizational workflow processes and underlying applications. The key issue in flexible workflows is the modelling of the loose or partial workflow. Thus rather than enforcing control through a rigid, or highly prescriptive model that attempts to capture every step and every option within the process, the model is defined in a more relaxed or "flexible" manner, that allows individual instances to determine their own (unique) processes. How to achieve such an approach to modeling is a significant challenge and has been addressed in [SSO01]
Shazia Sadiq (2000) Handling Dynamic Schema Change in Process Models. Australian Database Conference, Canberra, Australia. Jan 27 - Feb 02, 2000.
Shazia Sadiq (2000) On Capturing Exceptions in Workflow Process Models. Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Business Information Systems. Poznan, Poland. April 12 -13 2000.
Shazia Sadiq, Olivera Marjanovic, Maria E. Orlowska (2000) Managing Change and Time in Dynamic Workflow Processes. International Journal of Cooperative Information Systems. Vol. 9, Nos. 1 & 2. March -June 2000.
Shazia Sadiq, Wasim Sadiq, Maria E. Orlowska (2001) Pockets of Flexibility in Workflow Specification. SUBMITTED to refereed conference in May, 2001.
Cross-Organizational Workflow Management
Although the topic of virtual enterprises, which is an application domain for cross-organisational workflows, has been researched for more than six years, the establishment of real-life virtual enterprises is still a difficult task that requires significant manual configuration work and still it does often limit the interaction requirements of the participants. This research therefore investigates how far the boundaries of today's workflow technologies can be stretched and where concepts need to be extended. The group carries out research in partial workflow models and generic architectures that support the interoperability of workflow management systems. The aim is the reasoning, description and development of a generic cross-organisational workflow architecture and workflow model taking into account flexibility in workflow management
Schulz, K.; Orlowska, M. "Architectural Issues for Cross-Organisational B2B Interactions", Full Paper -International Workshop on Distributed Dynamic Multiservice Architectures (DDMA) in conjunction with the 21st International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS-21), IEEE Computer Society Press, http://cactus.eas.asu.edu/ICDCS2001 , Phoenix, USA, April 2001
Based on a real-life procurement scenario the paper analyses the state of the art in cross-organisational workflow research and presents a workflow model and architecture for cross-organisational workflows. The paper proposes an orchestration-based workflow approach where one workflow engine coordinates the interaction between partner workflow engines to bridge the gap between heterogeneous workflow models.
Schulz, K.; Orlowska, M. "Service-based Marketplaces", Short Paper and Presentation, SAP Research and Applications Congress, San Diego, USA, February 2001
The short paper and subsequent presentation describes how the concepts of electronic services are applied to a B2B marketplace environment. It presents an interaction taxonomy and elaborates how electronic marketplaces can be built upon orchestrated shared business processes based on e-services.
Schulz, K.; Milosevic, Z. "Architecting Cross-Organisational B2B Interactions"; Full Paper and Presentation -Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Enterprise Distributed Object Computing (EDOC 2000), Makuhari, Japan, pp.92-101, 2000, ISBN 0-7695-0867-7, IEEE Computer Society, 2000
The paper analyses the shortcomings of existing workflow standards and approaches in workflow research that prevent support of cross-organisational workflows. It argues that pure peer-to-peer solutions are insufficient because they assume mutually aware components, which is unrealistic in a heterogeneous environment, such as a virtual organisation. Based on ongoing work at OMG on enterprise distributed object computing, the paper proposes a hierarchically workflow model and a supporting architecture.
Web Information Systems
Web Information Systems are built for E-Commerce. A number of issues are investigated in this area.
Engineering of E-Commerce is about the life cycle of building web-enabled information systems.
Web Data Mining. The research in this area is to apply data mining algorithms to discover website access patterns and relevant website information to evaluate websites.
Web Site Assessment. This research work is to conduct the both subjective and objective assessment automatically by using web interface agents to access web pages and evaluate them according to an assessment framework. The web interface agents are executed based on a knowledge base that can either quantitatively or qualitatively assess websites for the identified assessment criteria. Given the massive web pages available on the Internet, this research work is to use the distributed artificial intelligence to process the web pages to understand their ontological structures and to classify their business purposes.
Web Database Performance. This research work is to apply a top-down approach to analyse the factors that affect the web-enabled databases. If we treat the whole WWW as a giant database, at the high level, the data expression/representation, transmission and integration will be required to provide the web data services. The performance issues will be the studied based on the architectures of data integration, web data mediators (Intelligent Portals) etc. as the efficiency of the information gateway. At the low level, the performance issues are about the self-tunning, knowledge-driven tunning of the database performance in the 3-tierd web databases systems.
Web Information Gateway. This research work is to apply workflow management on web information systems. We consider a multi-layered architecture for the web information collection, deployment, and flow control. With the understanding of web users, the information is pushed to user or any web application as web data service to the right place at right time. Currently both the MS .NET and J2EE are promising technology to develop the web information gateway. We will try to develop the system as the technology independent architecture to use it as a main component of a Web Information System.
Xue Li (2001) Building Intelligent Business Portals, to appear in Proceedings 4th Asia Pacific Web Conference, Changsha, China, Nov. 2001.
Xue Li (2001) Intelligent Business Portals, Chapter to appear in Book: Architecture Issues in E-Commerce, Idea Group Publishing.
Xue Li (2001) Web Interface Agents for Assessment of Commercial Websites, paper submitted to International Conference on 2nd Web Information Engineering, Kyoto, Dec 2001.
Xue Li (2001) On the Assessment of Commercial Web Site – An Expert System Approach, paper submitted to 12th Australian Conference on Information Systems, Coffs Harbour, NSW Dec. 2001
Xue Li and Xingzhi Sun (2001) Reflective Database Performance Tuning, paper submitted to 13th Australian Database Conference, Melbourne, Jan. 2002.
Xue Li and Xingzhi Sun (2001) Reflective Intelligent Interface Agent, paper submitted to 14th Australian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Adelaide, Dec. 2001
Xue Li (2000), “Engineering Issues in Internet Commerce”, Chapter 1, Internet Commerce and Software Agents, Bob Bignall (ed), Idea Group Publishing, Aug. 2000.
Xue Li (2000), "Perspectives in Engineering Web-Enabled Electronic Commerce Systems", Proceedings of Pacific Asia Conference on Information Systems (PACIS 2000), June 2000, pp444-456.
Xue Li and Graham Low (2000), "Fuzzy Logic in Web Data Mining", Proceedings of the 4th IFSR & IEEE World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (SCI' 2000), Vol III, , 2000 pp579-584.
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