With the advancement of technologies in wireless communication and computer down-sizing, it becomes possible to access a global network using handy terminals which are equipped with wireless communication facilities. In such a mobile computing environment, data management is one of the primary objectives of effective computer uses. However, since conventional distributed data management technologies assume that servers and clients are fixed at certain locations in a network, they do not provide any tools to construct advanced applications which make full use of dynamically changing information in such an environment. In this paper, in order to incorporate data distributed over mobile computing environment, we propose a dynamic data integration mechanism called MobiView which is an enhanced view mechanism of a conventional database system. In MobiView, we introduce four methods for database indication without using conventional host name or its local name: host-specified, cell-specified, location-dependent, and MobiView-oriented, through which we discuss how to handle both mobile database servers and mobile database clients.

Complex rule conditions are commonly required to describe complicated business semantics. In these cases, efficient condition evaluation is crucial for high performance of active database systems. Most previous works used the incremental evaluation techniques, whose operations are relatively expensive due to the processing based on the exact calculation of the condition expression. In this paper we propose a new filtering technique that effectively identifies false condition in an early stage of condition monitoring. Since the results of condition evaluation tend to be false in most practical cases, an efficient filtering method can highly facilitate fast condition evaluation. The proposed filtering technique is developed based on the new perspective of database state and database operations, i. e. , a vector space model. We first present vector representations of database states, database operations, and complex condition expressions. Then, we propose a filtering method based on the properties of a vector space, called the sphere containment test. Our proposed method determines the truth value of the rule conditions only with the delta vectors maintained in main memory. We compare our method with a typical incremental evaluation method and show that the proposed method can give a significant performance enhancement.

In recent years, the rapid advancements of wireless communication technology and computer down-sizing technology have enabled users to utilize computing resources anywhere in the computer network. New applications constructed on the mobile database system are becoming popular. However, the current database systems do not provide special facilities for specific update operations in a mobile computing environment. Moreover, due to the lack of a common data handling method and a mutual communication mechanism, varieties in implementations may cause applications to be incompatible with each other. In this paper, we take up the issue of data handling, in a mobile computing environment, and propose an active mobile database system (AMDS) to solve this issue. First, we review the difficulties of dynamic update of databases in a mobile computing environment, and provide a basic concept of AMDS as a solution for these difficulties. In order to construct an AMDS, we focus on asynchronous events such as the appearance and disappearance of a mobile computer in a wireless communication cell. Then we provide a facility to specify the behavior of each system in Event-Condition-Action(ECA) rules in the same way as normal active database systems. Moreover, we show the architecture and the design of our implementation of AMDS. And, finally AMDS can be easily implemented as a common database infrastructure and work well on heterogeneous systems through indoor experiments.

The purpose of this research is to analyze production rules with coupling modes in active databases and to exploit an assistant system for rule programming. Each production rule is a specification including an event, a condition, and an action. The action is automatically executed whenever the event occurs and the condition is satisfied. Coupling modes are useful to control execution order of transactions. For example, a transaction for consistency check should be executed after transactions for update. An active database, which is a database with production rules, can spontaneously update database states and check their consistency. Production rules provide a powerful mechanism for knowledge-bases. However it is very difficult in general to predict how a set of production rules will behave because of cascading rule triggers, concurrency, and so on. We are attempting to adopt a process algebra as a basic tool to analyze production rules. In order to describe and analyze concurrent and communicating systems, process algebras such as CCS, CSP, ACP, and π-calculus, are well known. However there are some difficulties to apply existing process algebras to analysis of production rules in growing process trees by process creation. In this paper we propose a process algebra named CCSPR (a Calculus of Communicating Systems with Production Rules), Which is an extension of CCS. An advantage of CCSPR is to syntactically describe growing process trees. Therefore, production rules can be appropriately analyzed in CCSPR. After giving definitions and properties of CCSPR, we show an example of analysis of production rules in CCSPR.