Thus researchers, students and faculty, trainers, application specialists, system managers, technology watchers and marketing executives of RDBMS/Client Server/CASE products will all find sources of valuable information at COMAD '97.
The central focus, however, will be its rich technical sessions of contributed papers, projecting a wide spectrum of research results from all over the globe.
Many leading information technology practitioners advocate that the success of information systems in organizations lies in the conceptual and clear understanding of the business, an acceptance that business is in a constant state of flux and that there is a need to shift from an application view to a business view. This tutorial outlines the inadequacies of building business information systems based on business requirements that are only a snapshot of a business's dynamic life. It also assesses the concept of Business Objects as a means of building information systems that meet the needs of the business. The tutorial will concentrate on the specification, design and implementation of business object components and assess their suitability for the delivery of business application. The tutorial will be based on the work of Object Management Group's, Business Object Domain Task Force, Oliver Sims work on Co-operative Business Objects and the research work undertaken at South Bank University.
About the Speakers:
Dr Dilip Patel is currently a Principal Lecturer in Information Systems and Head of the Centre for Information and Office Systems at South Bank University, London. His main academic interest lies in the area of Object-Oriented Information Systems, Conceptual Modelling and Databases. He has over the years undertaken consultancy work for British Aerospace, GEC Marconi and Robson Rhodes. He is currently supervising six PhD. students in the following areas: Quality Assurance; Decision Support Systems; Object-Oriented and Temporal Databases.
The talk is divided into three parts, discussing two aspects of Web
and Databases, and extending it by the end to issues of the personal
research of Dr Mueller.
The first part would be on database connectivity, giving an overview
of the past three years that started with CGI scripts, got to JDBC,
and meanwhile to RMI based connectivity and CORBA based approaches.
The second part would be on querying information sources on the Web.
This gives an overview of efforts in query languages and integration
of semi-structured data.
The third part would elaborate the idea of information markets, like
the DecisionNet, MMM and MatSe.
About the Speaker:
Dr.Rudolf Mueller is an assistant professor of information systems at Humboldt-University in Berlin. He is also associated with the National Research Center SFB 373 ``Quantification and Simulation of Economic Processes''. His research interests are in combinatorial optimization, information networks and software engineering. His current work focuses on the design of computational services in the Internet, investigating applications for combinatorial optimization, decision support and statistical data analysis Dr. Mueller has a Diploma in mathematics from the University of Bonn and a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from the Technical University of Berlin.
Traditional (especially, relational) database technology is best suited for robust and efficient Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) on operational data. Decision support applications require efficient support for complex analyses and pattern mining on historical data. The technologies of Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) and Data Mining are evolving in this direction. Both technologies often require historical data to be available in a separate dedicated Data Warehouse, where data from multiple heterogenous sources are assimilated, their numerous conflicts reconciled, and integrated. Some of the major steps involved in this process are (i) interoperating with heterogenous data sources, and (ii) supporting OLAP breed of "queries" and their efficient processing. In this tutorial we will discuss the state of the art, limitations of the technologies as they exist today, as well as research that has gone into laying the foundations for heterogenous database interoperability, multi-dimensional OLAP style analysis queries and their efficient processing, key ingredients for realizing an effective Data Warehousing/OLAP technology. This tutorial will cover pragmatic issues as well as foundations and techniques.
About the Speaker:
Laks V S Lakshmanan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada, where he is heading the Database Systems Research Group. He graduated from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India, and spent two years at the University of Toronto as a post-doctoral fellow. His research covers numerous aspects of relational, object-oriented and deductive databases, including multi-database interoperability, integration of heterogenous data sources (incl. semi-structured and unstructured ones such as the internet, spreadsheets, documents, etc.), multi-dimensional databases, data warehousing, OLAP, and data mining. This tutorial is based on a tutorial on a similar topic to be given by Laks Lakshmanan and Raymond Ng at the International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, Las Vegas, CA, USA, November 1997, and a mini-course on the same topic given by Lakshmanan at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, during March-April 1997.
Mr K Padmanabhan, Dr K Sundar, Dr Santosh Mohanty, Mr Deenanath Kholkar
With efficient construction and verification of models of patterns embedded in large databases, data mining is emerging as a key technology for enterprises that wish to improve quality of their decision making and gain competitive advantage by exploiting operational and other available data. Data Mining evolved as a collection of applicative problems and efficient solution algorithms relative to rather peculiar problems, all focussed on the discovery of relevant information hidden in databases of huge dimensions. These tools and techniques are the subject of the rapidly emerging field of knowledge discovery in databases.
The real-world events and activities have the context of time, and entities change their state over time. Many applications require this time dimension to be explicitly captured within the database design as well as within the processing, so that time-validity of data can be examined and history data can be analyzed. Conventional database systems offer little support for this beyond providing 'date' and 'time' domains and leaving it to users to meet the requirements through design and programming. Realizing that this is quite inadequate, there has been considerable research effort directed towards extending database systems' functionality for supporting time and history data. In this talk, the major achievements of this research in temporal databases, the impact they would have on future DBMSs, and how application designers should exploit these functionalities will be highlighted.
About the Speaker:
Dr. Nandlal L. Sarda is a professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. He has been on the faculty at IIT Bombay since 1976. He also chaired the CSE department from June 94 to August 97. He was a visiting Associate Professor at University of New Brunswick in Canada from Sept'86 to Nov'88.
His research interests are in the areas of database systems and software engineering. For the last few years, he has focused on developing research framework for Temporal Databases. This research has lead to many papers and articles in journals and conferences.
Dr. Sarda has been associated with many journals as reviewer and editorial board member. He has also served as PC member for many international conferences in database systems. He was one of the PC Chairs for the VLDB'96 conference held in Mumbai, India. He also works as advisor and consultant to many organizations for planning, acquisition and implementation of information technology based solutions.
Although recovery methods have been studied extensively by researchers in fault tolerance and in database areas, the existing methods assume that failures are independent of each other. This assumption does not hold under information attacks because these attacks are likely to be coordinated and malicious in nature and, moreover, the attacker can be assumed to be familiar with the intricacies of the system being attacked. Therefore, achieving recovery requires modifications and extensions of existing techniques together with novel techniques that are only suitable for surviving information attacks.
We have adopted a fault-tolerance approach that addresses all phases of survivability: attack detection, damage confinement, damage assessment and repair, and attack avoidance. This talk will describe our research dealing with each of these phases.
About the Speaker:
Sushil Jajodia received his PhD from the University of Oregon, Eugene. He is Director of Center for Secure Information Systems and Professor of Information and Software Systems Engineering at the George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia. He joined GMU after serving as the director of the Database and Expert Systems Program at the National Science Foundation. Before that he was the head of the Database and Distributed Systems Section at the Naval Research Laboratory, Washington and Associate Professor of Computer Science and Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Missouri, Columbia. He has also been a visiting professor at the University of Milan, Italy and at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Cambridge University, England.
Dr. Jajodia's research interests include information security, temporal databases, and replicated databases. He has published more than 200 technical papers in the refereed journals and conference proceedings and has edited ten books, including Advanced Transaction Models and Architectures, Kluwer (1997), Multimedia Database Systems: Issues and Research Directions, Springer-Verlag Artificial Intelligence Series (1996), Information Security: An Integrated Collection of Essays, IEEE Computer Society Press (1995), and Temporal Databases: Theory, Design, and Implementation, Benjamin/Cummings (1993). He received the 1996 Kristian Beckman award from IFIP TC 11 for his contributions to the discipline of Information Security.
Dr. Jajodia has served in different capacities for various journals and conferences. He is the founding co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Computer Security. He is on the editorial boards of IEEE Concurrency and International Journal of Cooperative Information Systems and a contributing editor of the Computer & Communication Security Reviews. He serves as the program chair of the 1997 IFIP WG 11.5 Working Conference on Integrity and Control in Information Systems and 1998 IFIP WG 11.3 Working Conference on Database Security. He has been named a Golden Core member for his service to the IEEE Computer Society. He is a past chairman of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Data Engineering and the Magazine Advisory Committee. He is a senior member of the IEEE and a member of IEEE Computer Society and Association for Computing Machinery. The URL for his web page is http://www.isse.gmu.edu/~csis/.
Theme: Internet and Databases
Members : Latha Ramesh, Search International
Naresh Nagarajan, Dun & Bradstreet Satyam Software Ltd
Major V V Chandrasekaran, Vetri Software India Ltd
K AnanthaKrishnan, Tata Consultancy Services
M Nataraj, BHEL
D Selvaraj, Instant Data Systems
T R Vasudeva Rao, Sundaram Motors
S Ramaswamy, Anubhav Plantations Limited
B Sivakumar, L & T Mcneil Ltd
Others : S Padmanabhan, CEO, ASDC - Finance Committee
K Adivarahan, DLS Consultants P Ltd - Registration committee