Connected Information Management

Society is currently inundated with more information than ever, making efficient management a necessity. Alas, most of current information management suffers from several levels of disconnectedness: Applications partition data into segregated islands, small notes don’t fit into traditional application categories, navigating the data is different for each kind of data; data is either available at a certain computer or only online, but rarely both. Connected information management (CoIM) is an approach to information management that avoids these ways of disconnectedness. The core idea of CoIM is to keep all information in a central repository, with generic means for organization such as tagging. The heterogeneity of data is taken into account by offering specialized editors. The central repository eliminates the islands of application-specific data and is formally grounded by a CoIM model. The foundation for structured data is an RDF repository. The RDF editing meta-model (REMM) enables form-based editing of this data, similar to database applications such as MS access. Further kinds of data are supported by extending RDF, as follows. Wiki text is stored as RDF and can both contain structured text and be combined with structured data. Files are also supported by the CoIM model and are kept externally. Notes can be quickly captured and annotated with meta-data. Generic means for organization and navigation apply to all kinds of data. Ubiquitous availability of data is ensured via two CoIM implementations, the web application HYENA/Web and the desktop application HYENA/Eclipse. All data can be synchronized between these applications. The applications were used to validate the CoIM ideas

Role-based Data Management

Database systems build an integral component of today’s software systems and as such they are the central point for storing and sharing a software system’s data while ensuring global data consistency at the same time. Introducing the primitives of roles and their accompanied metatype distinction in modeling and programming languages, results in a novel paradigm of designing, extending, and programming modern software systems. In detail, roles as modeling concept enable a separation of concerns within an entity. Along with its rigid core, an entity may acquire various roles in different contexts during its lifetime and thus, adapts its behavior and structure dynamically during runtime. Unfortunately, database systems, as important component and global consistency provider of such systems, do not keep pace with this trend. The absence of a metatype distinction, in terms of an entity’s separation of concerns, in the database system results in various problems for the software system in general, for the application developers, and finally for the database system itself. In case of relational database systems, these problems are concentrated under the term role-relational impedance mismatch. In particular, the whole software system is designed by using different semantics on various layers. In case of role-based software systems in combination with relational database systems this gap in semantics between applications and the database system increases dramatically. Consequently, the database system cannot directly represent the richer semantics of roles as well as the accompanied consistency constraints. These constraints have to be ensured by the applications and the database system loses its single point of truth characteristic in the software system. As the applications are in charge of guaranteeing global consistency, their development requires more effort in data management. Moreover, the software system’s data management is distributed over several layers, which results in an unstructured software system architecture. To overcome the role-relational impedance mismatch and bring the database system back in its rightful position as single point of truth in a software system, this thesis introduces the novel and tripartite RSQL approach. It combines a novel database model that represents the metatype distinction as first class citizen in a database system, an adapted query language on the database model’s basis, and finally a proper result representation. Precisely, RSQL’s logical database model introduces Dynamic Data Types, to directly represent the separation of concerns within an entity type on the schema level. On the instance level, the database model defines the notion of a Dynamic Tuple that combines an entity with the notion of roles and thus, allows for dynamic structure adaptations during runtime without changing an entity’s overall type. These definitions build the main data structures on which the database system operates. Moreover, formal operators connecting the query language statements with the database model data structures, complete the database model. The query language, as external database system interface, features an individual data definition, data manipulation, and data query language. Their statements directly represent the metatype distinction to address Dynamic Data Types and Dynamic Tuples, respectively. As a consequence of the novel data structures, the query processing of Dynamic Tuples is completely redesigned. As last piece for a complete database integration of a role-based notion and its accompanied metatype distinction, we specify the RSQL Result Net as result representation. It provides a novel result structure and features functionalities to navigate through query results. Finally, we evaluate all three RSQL components in comparison to a relational database system. This assessment clearly demonstrates the benefits of the roles concept’s full database integration

Spray: programming with a persistent distributed heap

We introduce a programming paradigm for distributed applications based on a persistent distributed heap. A proof-of-concept implementation is provided as a Javascript library, together with several examples that embody popular patterns for web applications

Kiel Declarative Programming Days 2013

This report contains the papers presented at the Kiel Declarative Programming Days 2013, held in Kiel (Germany) during September 11-13, 2013. The Kiel Declarative Programming Days 2013 unified the following events: * 20th International Conference on Applications of Declarative Programming and Knowledge Management (INAP 2013) * 22nd International Workshop on Functional and (Constraint) Logic Programming (WFLP 2013) * 27th Workshop on Logic Programming (WLP 2013) All these events are centered around declarative programming, an advanced paradigm for the modeling and solving of complex problems. These specification and implementation methods attracted increasing attention over the last decades, e.g., in the domains of databases and natural language processing, for modeling and processing combinatorial problems, and for high-level programming of complex, in particular, knowledge-based systems

The "Jatakanidanakatha": A critical study, Tibetan edition and annotated.

This thesis provides a critical study, an annotated translation, and a diplomatic edition of the Tibetan text of the Jatakanidana. Its overall aim is the study of the Tibetan text and its relationship to the Pali version. This is accompanied by a study of the bodhisatta ideal as it is found in this Pali text, and in other related canonical and commentarial works. The thesis is divided into the following three parts: Part One consists of a study in five chapters: Chapter one provides a description of the methodologies used in the thesis and the historical background to the text. Chapter two defines the genre of literature to which the Jatakanidana belongs, and also discusses the doctrine of past buddhas as it is presented in the text. Chapter three deals with the doctrine of the bodhisatta as it is presented in the text, and provides an analysis of the doctrines peculiar to this Pali bodhisatta concept. Chapter four provides a detailed study of the concept and nature of the ten paramis, and shows how the paramis are defined in the literature produced prior to the Jatakanidana. Chapter five examines the way the Jatakanidana presents the life of Gotama as a bodhisatta. Part Two provides an annotated translation of the Jatakanidana based on the edited text of its Tibetan version. Part Three provides a Tibetan edition that has been produced utilising five different Tibetan editions of the text, together with appendices and bibliography. The appendices include the following items: (i) Dhammapada verses occurring in the Jatakanidana, their Tibetan translations, with Sanskrit and Prakrit parallels. (ii) Miscellaneous Pali verses in the Jatakanidana, their Tibetan translations together with Sanskrit and Prakrit parallels. (iii) Jatakanidana verses with no identifiable Pali canonical source. (iv) Jataka verses in the Jatakanidana varying from the extant Jataka verses. The Bibliography consists of primary sources in Tibetan, Pali and Sanskrit which are cited in the thesis, and secondary sources referred to in the study