Evolving Databases: An Application to Electronic Commerce

Abstract

Many complex and dynamic database applications such as product modeling and negotiation monitoring require a number of features that have been adopted in semantic models and databases such as active rules, constraints, inheritance, etc. Unfortunately, each feature has largely been considered in isolation. Furthermore, in a commercial negotiation, participants staking their financial well-beings will never accept a system they cannot gain a precise behavioral understanding of. We attack these problems with a rich and extensible database model, evolving databases, with a clear and precise semantics based on evolving algebras [5]. We also briefly describe a prototype implementation of the model [12]. The first contribution of this paper is a rich and extensible database model primarily aimed at capturing rapidly changing environments. We describe electronic commerce negotiation using this evolving database (EDB 1 ) that captures the state of traded products, of negotiators, and the accepted laws governing the particular negotiation. We use the term evolving to stress the extremely dynamic of a negotiation. Negotiators should be able to change the product descriptions, orders, and even protocols of negotiation on the fly (e.g., by introducing a mediator in case of Although we will focus the presentation in this paper on the singularly interesting domain of commercial negotiations, the model is clearly not limited to such applications. An EDB is built using extensible sets of domain features and entities that are described by instances of these domain features. For instance, constraint could be a domain feature and salary > 100K an instance for this feature. Some of the DFs are quite generic capturing: attribute/value pairs (as in a product relationships between these entities, active rules (e.g., to modify a quoted price when the product description c NIST; CS Department, UMBC y CS Department, Stanford University. On leave from INRIA-Rocquencourt, France z NASA-CESDIS;