Asuman Dogac

Tamer Özsu

Amit Sheth

Leonid Kalinichenko

Workflow management systems (WFMS) are enjoying increasing popular ity due to their ability to coordinate and streamline complex organizational processes within organizations of all sizes. Organizational processes are de scriptions of an organization's activities engineered to fulfill its mission such as completing a business contract or satisfying a specific customer request. Gaining control of these processes allows an organization to reengineer and improve each process or adapt them to changing requirements. The goal of WFMSs is to manage these organizational processes and coordinate their execution. was demonstrated in the first half The high degree of interest in WFMSs of the 1990s by a significant increase in the number of commercial products (once estimated to about 250) and the estimated market size (in combined $2 billion in 1996. Ensuing maturity product sales and services) of about is demonstrated by consolidations during the last year. Ranging from mere e-mail based calendar tools and flow charting tools to very sophisticated inte grated development environments for distributed enterprise-wide applications and systems to support programming in the large, these products are finding an eager market and opening up important research and development op portunities. In spite of their early success in the market place, however, the current generation of systems can benefit from further research and develop ment, especially for increasingly complex and mission-critical applications.

Workflow Management Systems and Interoperability

Asuman Doğaç

Workflow management systems enjoy increasing popularity due to their ability to coordinate and streamline complex organizational processes within organizations of all sizes. Control of these processes allows an organization to reengineer and improve or adapt them. Interest in workflow management systems was demonstrated in the early 1990s by an increased number of commercial products in an estimated $2 billion market. This book addresses recent advances in workflow management systems. Based on a NATO workshop held in 1997, it is an integrated collection of papers by leading international researchers. Topics emphasized include interoperability, Internet technologies to improve system capabilities, scalable and dynamic cooperation technologies, and workflow system prototypes.

Sushil Jajodia

M. Tamar Özsu

This book constitutes the proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Mul timedia Information Systems (MIS’98) held in Istanbul, Turkey in September 1998. This workshop builds upon the success of the three previous workshops in this series that were held in Arlington, VA, West Point, NY, and Como, Italy. As in the past, this is a small focused workshop, consisting of participants drawn from a wide variety of disciplines (e. g. theory, algorithms, real time systems, networks, operating sys tems, graphics and visualization, databases, artificial intelligence, etc. ), all of which focus on research on one or more aspects of multimedia systems. The workshop program included 19 technical papers, three invited talks, and one panel. Of the technical papers 13 were accepted as regular papers and 6 as short con tributions. These papers cover a number of areas including: Multimedia storage system design Image storage and retrieval systems Quality of service considerations Networking support for multimedia information systems Distributed virtual environments Multimedia system architecture issues The invited talks were given by three experts well known for their work in this area. Satish K. Tripathi’s (University of California, Riverside) talk was on “Quality of Service Support for Multimedia Data on Internet”, Paul Emmerman (US Army Re search Laboratory) discussed “Visualizing the Digital Battlefield”, and Val Tannen (University of Pennsylvania) presented “Heterogeneous Data Integration with Mobile Information Manager”. The panel discussion, organized by Chahab Nastar of INRIA, France, addressed “Trends in Visual Information Retrieval.

4th International Workshop, MIS'98, Istanbul, Turkey September 24-26, 1998, Proceedings

Advances in Multimedia Information Systems

M. Tamer Özsu

Ozgur Ulusoy

Current Trends in Data Management Technology reports on the most recent, important advances in data management as it applies to diverse issues, such as Web information management, workflow systems, electronic commerce, reengineering business processes, object-oriented databases, and more.

Current Trends in Data Management Technology

Alexandros Biliris

M.Tamer Özsu

Timos Sellis

Object-oriented database management systems (OODBMSs) have generated significant excitement in the database community in the last decade. This interest stems from a real need for data management support for what are called "advanced application areas" that are not well-served by relational technology. The case for object-oriented technology has been made on three fronts. First is the data modeling requirements of the new applications. Some of the more important shortcomings of the relational systems in meeting the requirements of these applications include: 1. Relational systems deal with a single object type: a relation. A relation is used to model different real-world objects, but the semantics of this association is not part of the database. Furthermore, the attributes of a relation may come only from simple and fixed data type domains (numeric, character, and, sometimes, date types). Advanced applications require explicit storage and manipulation of more abstract types (e.g., images, design documents) and the ability for the users to define their own application-specific types. Therefore, a rich type system supporting user defined abstract types is required. 2. The relational model structures data in a relatively simple and flat manner. Non traditional applications require more complex object structures with nested objects (e.g., a vehicle object containing an engine object).

Asuman Dogac

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