Activity Report:

The activity consisted of two parts: a number of working meetings held in conjunction with the EDBT98 Int. Conf. and a follow-up visit to Universita Polytechnica de Catalunya.

Two topics were addressed in the meetings:

1) Validation of requirements in event-driven systems. This activity is conducted jointly with Ernest Teniente of UPC. The meeting permitted us to plan the follow up of a research published in the proceedings of the RIDS97 workshop. In particular, a plan has been established to finalize an extended version of the work to be submitted to a major journal. The extension concerns the identification of a very general framework foridentifying useful properties of event-driven specifications, expressed in the form of event-condition-action (ECA) rules, which can then be verified using planning techniques. With respect to our pervious work, we now have not only a way of formalizing properties as first-order goals to be submitted to a planner for validation, but also a meta-framework in which novel properties can be identified and investigated. As an application, we demionstrate how our approach subsumes

2) Conceptualization of requirements for Web applications. This topic will constitute the next subject of collaboration between Politecnico and UPC. Politecnico will provide a semi-formal model for capturing requirements of Web application plus tools to input and manage such requirements and to generate applications from them (these were demonstrated at EDBT to the UPC people). UPC will consider the problem of validating models of Web applications and of defining derived information in the Web context. A very promising research direction will be the possibility of defining views over hypertextual interfaces, to capture presentation requirements suited to specific user groups.

VISIT TO UPC
As a follow up to the meetings, a visit was done to UPD, during which Piero Fraternali gave a seminar on the subject of analysis, design and implementation data-intensive applications for the Web. In the seminar, a novel conceptual model for Web applications was presented (HDM-lite) which lends itself to the automatic generation of applications running on the Web on top of relational databases.