A particular challenge for engineers is to encapsulate and exploit knowledge gained through past use of their problem solving environments (PSEs) to enable new designs to be developed more rapidly or at lower cost. Any attempt to archive this knowledge must be sufficiently flexible to cope with the changing landscape caused by evolution of the PSE and its use. With the School of Engineering Sciences, we have developed a system which addresses these issues using Java and XML to automatically generate a database from files which log information about the engineers’ use of the PSE.

This work is related to a more general project to automate data management in science and engineering where considerably more data is being generated than ever before and there is a great need for tools to ease the task of archiving and managing it. Whilst large generated datasets can be stored as files, valuable metadata about users, times, resources, methods, and result summaries also needs to be archived. We show how relational database schemas can be generated automatically from XML Schemas for the storage of XML documents. We also illustrate how the database schema can evolve as the XML Schema changes over time to accommodate the evolving structure of the data. This relieves the user from much of the data management task, allowing them to concentrate on the analysis of results and metadata from simulations and designs. This technology can also be used to automatically log web service request and response messages.

Papers

Wason, J.L., Cox, S.J. and Keane, A.J. (2000) Flexible Knowledge Repositories for Problem Solving Environments. Data Management 2000 - Proceedings of the International Workshop on Advanced Data Storage / Management for High Performance Computing, CLRC - Daresbury Laboratory, February 23-25 2000. p.199-205. [doc]

Posters

Wason, J.L., Cox, S.J. and Keane, A.J. (2001) Extensible Database Generation using XML Schema. Extreme Markup Languages 2001, Montreal, Canada, 12-13 August 2001. [ppt]

Links

Further Information - Flexible Relational Database Generation using XML Schema

Slide Shows