XML: aplicações e tecnologias associadas: 6th National Conference

This volume contains the papers presented at the Sixth Portuguese XML Conference, called XATA (XML, Aplicações e Tecnologias Associadas), held in Évora, Portugal, 14-15 February, 2008. The conference followed on from a successful series held throughout Portugal in the last years: XATA2003 was held in Braga, XATA2004 was held in Porto, XATA2005 was held in Braga, XATA2006 was held in Portalegre and XATA2007 was held in Lisboa. Dued to research evaluation criteria that are being used to evaluate researchers and research centers national conferences are becoming deserted. Many did not manage to gather enough submissions to proceed in this scenario. XATA made it through. However with a large decrease in the number of submissions. In this edition a special meeting will join the steering committee with some interested attendees to discuss XATA's future: internationalization, conference model, ... We think XATA is important in the national context. It has succeeded in gathering and identifying a comunity that shares the same research interests and has promoted some colaborations. We want to keep "the wheel spinning"... This edition has its program distributed by first day's afternoon and next day's morning. This way we are facilitating travel arrangements and we will have one night to meet

A Smart Products Lifecycle Management (sPLM) Framework - Modeling for Conceptualization, Interoperability, and Modularity

Autonomy and intelligence have been built into many of today’s mechatronic products, taking advantage of low-cost sensors and advanced data analytics technologies. Design of product intelligence (enabled by analytics capabilities) is no longer a trivial or additional option for the product development. The objective of this research is aimed at addressing the challenges raised by the new data-driven design paradigm for smart products development, in which the product itself and the smartness require to be carefully co-constructed. A smart product can be seen as specific compositions and configurations of its physical components to form the body, its analytics models to implement the intelligence, evolving along its lifecycle stages. Based on this view, the contribution of this research is to expand the “Product Lifecycle Management (PLM)” concept traditionally for physical products to data-based products. As a result, a Smart Products Lifecycle Management (sPLM) framework is conceptualized based on a high-dimensional Smart Product Hypercube (sPH) representation and decomposition. First, the sPLM addresses the interoperability issues by developing a Smart Component data model to uniformly represent and compose physical component models created by engineers and analytics models created by data scientists. Second, the sPLM implements an NPD3 process model that incorporates formal data analytics process into the new product development (NPD) process model, in order to support the transdisciplinary information flows and team interactions between engineers and data scientists. Third, the sPLM addresses the issues related to product definition, modular design, product configuration, and lifecycle management of analytics models, by adapting the theoretical frameworks and methods for traditional product design and development. An sPLM proof-of-concept platform had been implemented for validation of the concepts and methodologies developed throughout the research work. The sPLM platform provides a shared data repository to manage the product-, process-, and configuration-related knowledge for smart products development. It also provides a collaborative environment to facilitate transdisciplinary collaboration between product engineers and data scientists

Selection of a Scientific Data Management System (SDMS) Based on User Requirements

Pharmaceutical research/development and quality control laboratories are faced with prodigious amounts of data from a multitude of heterogeneous data sources in a compliant manner, as mandated by requirements from regulatory agencies like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). This has forced laboratories to use electronic data/information management systems to capture and maintain this data. Although the use of Laboratory Information Management Systems (LIMS) has gained widespread acceptance, pharmaceutical laboratories still struggle with the idea of system integration and lab automation using electronic laboratory notebooks (ELN) and more specifically scientific data management systems (SDMS), due to a normal resistance to change and a need to protect their existing IT investments. However, a properly assessed and validated SDMS offers the most significant benefits in terms of data quality, compliance, costs, and standardization across laboratories and interface capabilities to collect data from disparate sources and store them in a database for easy retrieval and management. In this research project, a detailed analysis of the functional and non-functional requirements for purchasing a SDMS, in addition to the analysis of the functionality of several of the mostly widely known SDMS is performed to determine which is most suitable for use in the pharmaceutical laboratories surveyed. Finally, validation requirements for a SDMS and more specifically computer system software in general is detailed and explained

Core Technologies for Native XML Database Management Systems

This work investigates the core technologies required to build Database Management Systems (DBMSs) for large collections of XML documents. We call such systems XML Base Management Systems (XBMSs). We identify requirements, and analyze how they can be met using a conventional DBMS. Our conclusion is that an XML support layer on top of an existing conventional DBMS does not address the requirements for XBMSs. Hence, we built a Native XBMS, called Natix. Natix has been developed completely from scratch, incorporating optimizations for high-performance XML processing in those places where they are most effective