Projects

• An Organisation Oriented Framework for Collaborative Business Processes
  (Funding: Australian Research Council Linkage Grant; Partners: SAP Research, Australia; Duration: 2006-2009)
  Business collaboration is about coordinating the information flow among organisations and linking their business processes. While most inter-organisational workflow approaches provide cooperation means to business processes of organisations, the autonomy of organisations and the openness of the collaboration environment have not been well supported. In this project, we will address them by proposing an organisation oriented framework which includes a relative workflow model and the supporting mechanisms. Implementation of the framework in Web services will also be conducted.
• Supporting Inter-organizational Business Processes in Web Service Environments
  Today's increasingly competitive, expanding global marketplace requires business integration across the organization boundary. The Web service framework provides a standard-based realization of the service-oriented computing paradigm that has emerged in response to the new way that organizations conduct their businesses via a loosely coupled integration model in the form of services. The challenge lies in the requirements to seamlessly integrate business processes of different organizations and to keep the autonomy of each organization at the same time. In this project, we aim to address the issues of workflow management for inter-organizational business processes, to build up a model for inter-organizational business processes, and to apply the Web service technologies to implement the model.
• Supporting Collaborative Business Transactions in Web Service Environments
  (Funding: Australian Research Council Discovery Grant; Partners: Victoria University of Technology, Australia, Macquarie University, Australia and Tilbury University, the Nederlands; Duration: 2005-2007)
  The Web service framework provides a standard-based realization of the service-oriented computing paradigm that has emerged in response to a fundamental shift in the way organizations conduct their businesses. To enable the Web services framework work for critical business processes, appropriate transactional support must be provided. Current Web service standards provide rudimentary transaction mechanisms to Web service applications. This project aims to propose a comprehensive framework that provides transactional support at all layers in defining and executing a business process in Web service environment.
• Constraints in XML Document Design and Mapping from Relational Databases
  (Funding: Australian Research Council Discovery Grant; Partners: University of South Australia; Duration: 2005-2007)
  XML has recently emerged as a standard for data representation and interchange on the Internet. While providing syntactic flexibility, XML provides little support for defining integrity constraints. This project looks into how integrity constraints can be explored and deployed to design high quality XML documents. The oldest and most well studied integrity constraints in relational databases, namely a functional dependency (FD) and multi-valued dependencies (MVD), will be revisited and applied to XML and a new normalization theory for XML will be developed. Constraint preserved transformation from relational databases to well structured XML documents will also be investigated.
• Integrating XML Documents
  With XML becoming a standard for data interchange and publication, huge amount of XML documents have been put on the Web. The flexibility of XML syntax also allows different representations of a data object, which brings challenges to applications that need to integrate XML documents created by different organizations. As such, approaches for integrating XML documents need to be investigated. In this project, we aim to address the issues in detecting and resolving structural and semantic conflicts among XML documents.
• XML Views of Relational Databases: Semantics and Update Problems (Funding: Australian Research Council Discovery Grant; Partners: University of South Australia, Chinese University of Hong Kong; Duration: 2008-2010)
  While significant effort has been put on creating and querying XML views over relational data, little work has been done on updating such XML views. This project aims to develop a theory on the semantics of XML views and a set of techniques for checking XML view updatability, detecting and handling data redundancy and unintended updates, translating view updates to relational updates, and processing recursive view updates. A prototype system will be built to evaluate a series of algorithms developed. The project will contribute greatly to the fundamental research in XML view updating, and deliver significant impact on related technology development.