My research involves a good mix of futuristic and present day research. As shown in the logo of my research, the main dimensions of my research in the area of dataBase systems are Energy-awareness, Large and growing content management, and Advanced aspects; such as context-aware query processing.
My current
research focuses on developing a mobile database management
system (MDBMS), where the client and server have wireless
connections. In addition the client is a battery-powered device,
such as sensor nodes, mobile phones, personal digital assistants
(PDAs), smart phones, sub-notebooks, etc. These kind of clients
do not need only advanced functionalities, such as semantic
caching or context-aware support, but also demand an
energy-aware systems and applications, which lead to better
uptime from the battery of the client.
I am interested in developing theories and applying them in
modern applications. For MDBMS, there are different
research applications, such as intelligent transportation
systems and patient monitoring systems, and tourist advisor
systems. The common between these applications is that the
client needs to access remotely the database based on contextual
information of the client. Context-aware services could be
provided by mobile service providers to support the intelligent
transportation and tourist advisor systems. In this case, mobile
service providers are to be more receptive to mobile users'
needs. I have developed a
working scenario describing these kind
of context-aware services. The scenario has been published at
the MDM Workshop ROSOC-M 2009.
Another Research Interest
Best Practices Management
Several applications of
information systems utilize monitoring processes to support
their activities. Examples include health care applications
(i.e., disease and medical record management) and financial
applications (i.e., customer relationship and portfolio
management). These information systems are standardized by best
practices, which refer to the best way to perform specified
activities. Information extracted from the best practices is
specified in form of rules as a pre-step for monitoring the
changes of interest in these applications. Most of research
efforts emphasize on the specification and execution of these
rules. Few research efforts focus on managing these rules as one
object that has a management life-cycle.
Through my PhD course, I have developed a generic framework,
called SIM, for for managing best practices as one object (plan)
that has a management life-cycle. In our framework, the best
practices are modelled as a skeletal plan, which contains sets
of rules defined using the user terminologies. As
object-oriented model, the skeletal plan is similar to a class,
from which several objects could be instantiated. The instance
of the skeletal plan is called an entity-specific (ES) plan, in
which the rules of the skeletal plan are mapped into low-level
rules such as SQL triggers. Moreover, I developed the AIM
language for specifying, instantiating and maintaining best
practices. The AIM language is based on XML and ECA rule
paradigm, and has been implemented using DBMS utilities to
support the advanced management required for the SIM framework.
