- Universität Zürich > Wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Fakultät > Informatik, Institut für > Prof. Dr. Klaus Dittrich (verstorben)
- Dittrich
Completed Research Project
- Title / Titel
- TeNDaX
- Original title / Originaltitel
- Text Native Database eXtension
- Summary / Zusammenfassung
- A significant gap lies between the handling of business (customer, product, finance, etc.) data and text data (documents). Documents are not treated as a product even though a lot of companies’ knowledge is stored within this structure. For a large-scale document management environment, local copies of remote data sources are often made. However, it is often difficult to monitor the sources in order to check for changes and to download changed data items to the copies. Very often, text documents are stored somewhere within a confusing file structure with an inscrutable hierarchy and low security. On the other hand, for operational functional data the infrastructure and the data are highly secure, multi-user capable and available to several other tools for compiling reports, data provenance, content and knowledge. Collaborative processes can be defined and applied to such data.
TeNDaX is a Text Native Database eXtension and makes use of such a philosophy for texts. It enables the storage of text in databases in a native form so that editing text is finally represented as real-time transactions. ‚Text editing’ includes writing and deleting text (characters), copying & pasting text, defining text layout & structure, inserting tables, pictures, and so on i.e. all the actions regularly carried out by word processing users. ‘Real-time transaction’ means that editing text (e.g. writing a character/word, setting the font for a paragraph, or pasting a section of text) invokes one or several database transactions so that everything which is typed appears within the editor as soon as these objects are stored persistently. Instead of creating files and storing them in a file system, the content of documents is stored in a special way in the database, which enables very fast real-time transactions for all editing processes.
The database schema and the above-mentioned transactions are created in such a way that everything can be done within a multi-user environment, as approved by database technology. As a consequence, many of the achievements (with respect to data organization and querying, recovery, integrity and security enforcement, multi-user operation, distribution management, uniform tool access, etc.) are now, by means of this approach, also available for word processing.
TeNDaX proposes a radically different approach, centered on natively representing text in fully-fledged databases, and incorporating all necessary collaboration support. Under collaboration support we understand functions such as editing, awareness, fine-grained security, sophisticated document management, versioning, business processes, text structure, data lineage, metadata mining, and multi-channel publishing - all within a collaborative, real-time and multi-user environment.
TeNDaX creates an extension of DBMS to manage text. The corresponding data type represents a ‘first-class citizen’ of a DBMS (like e.g. integers, character strings, etc.).
A comprehensive prototype of TeNDaX has been developed and is fully operational. A patent for the underlying concepts has been filed.
Weitere Informationen
- Publications / Publikationen
- T. B. Hodel and K. R. Dittrich, "Concept and prototype of a collaborative business process environment for document processing," Data & Knowledge Engineering, vol. 52, Special Issue: Collaborative Business Process Technologies, pp. 61-120, 2005.T. B. Hodel, D. Businger, and K. R. Dittrich, "Supporting Collaborative Layouting in Word Processing," proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Cooperative Information Systems (CoopIS), Larnaca (Cyprus), 2004.T. B. Hodel, H. Gall, and K. R. Dittrich, "Dynamic Collaborative Business Processes within Documents," proceedings of ACM Special Interest Group Conference on Design of Communication (SIGDOC) 2004, Memphis (USA), 2004.Weitere Informationen
- Keywords / Suchbegriffe
- Document business process technologies, native text database, computer supported cooperative work (CSCW), collaborative document processing, web-services
- Project Leadership and Contacts /
Projektleitung und Kontakte Prof. Dr. Klaus R. Dittrich (Project Leader) dittrich@ifi.uzh.ch Dipl. Inf. (FH) Christian Tilgner tilgner@ifi.uzh.ch Dipl. Inf. Dietrich Christopeit christo@ifi.uzh.ch Dr. Thomas B. Hodel-Widmer hodel@ifi.uzh.ch
- Funding Source(s) /
Unterstützt durch - Universität Zürich (position pursuing an academic career)
- Duration of Project / Projektdauer
- Jan 2002 to Jul 2008