UNamur / Precise / Research fields / Data engineering

Database applications evolution

An information system is developed to support the business processes of an organization. Any change in the latter or in the underlying technology requires corresponding changes in the information system.

PReCISE has studied this phenomenon for long and has developed innovative solutions to maintain the quality of informaton systems in an ever changing world.

In the database realm, three aspects have been addressed. First, evolution of organizational requirements leads to changes in the database. Second, inter-organization reengineering often implies interoperability problems among independent information systems. Third, technology evolution requires platform migration. These aspects of the phenomenon have been coped with through specific methodologies that are supported by components of the DB-MAIN CASE tools. Wrapper-based architectures have been designed to automatically control the evolution of databases in order to minimize the impact of these changes on the application programs. These results are exploited and maintained by spin-off ReveR. They are applied in several medium-size to large companies.