Research Report - Information Systems
The Information Systems group focuses on the following key research areas: (i) Human-computer interfaces and distributed environments, (ii) Workflow management systems, (iii) Data warehousing for spatial data and (iv) Web information systems. 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.
In the area of human-computer interfaces in distributed environments the general problem of concern 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.
The workflow management research addresses time management in production workflows, dynamic modification of business processes and integrated data analysis for workflow systems. A recent outcome has been the development of ‘FlowMake ‘, a workflow modelling and verification tool, which supports a product-independent process modelling language and facilitates automated verification of well-defined correctness criteria. Major research projects concern (i) time management, for which a tool called ‘Flowtime’ has been designed with current work addressing temporal support for workflow interoperability; (ii) workflow enabled flexible learning, which investigates deployment of workflow technology to support flexible learning; (iii) dynamically changing workflow processes and (iv) cross-organizational workflow management.
The general problem addressed in data warehousing concerns spatial data and in particular the selection of views that 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. The problem of spatial data warehouse design is also being investigated - while research into spatial information systems has been extensive, spatial data warehouse design techniques have received little attention. The 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. A related problem under study is the development of an efficient method for aggregation of spatial data to produce several levels of granularity of aggregations and allow users to specify the quality of data they require for their queries. This work 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.
In the area of web information systems the main projects are in (i) engineering of e-commerce which concerns the life cycle of building web-enabled information systems; (ii) web data mining which aims to apply data mining algorithms to discover website access patterns and relevant website information to evaluate websites; (iii) web site assessment using web interface agents to access and evaluate web pages; (iv) analysis of factors affecting web database performance; (v) a web information gateway using workflow management techniques.
Associated Staff
A/Prof Robert Colomb
Prof Peter Eklund
Dr Guido Governatori
Dr Ralf Muhlberger
Prof Maria Orlowska
Dr Shazia Sadiq
A/Prof Xiaofang Zhou
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