Supporting the data cube lifecycle: the power of ROLAP

The lifecycle of a data cube involves efficient construction and storage, fast query answering, and incremental updating. Existing ROLAP methods that implement data cubes are weak with respect to one or more of the above, focusing mainly on construction and storage. In this paper, we present a comprehensive ROLAP solution that addresses efficiently all functionality in the lifecycle of a cube and can be implemented easily over existing relational servers. It is a family of algorithms centered around a purely ROLAP construction method that provides fast computation of a fully materialized cube in compressed form, is incrementally updateable, and exhibits quick query response times that can be improved by low-cost indexing and caching. This is demonstrated through comprehensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets, whose results have shown great promise for the performance and scalability potential of the proposed techniques, with respect to both the size and dimensionality of the fact table. The project is co-financed within Op. Education by the ESF (European Social Fund) and National Resources.     

Generic lifecycle support in the ALMA environment

ALMA is an environment kernel supporting the elaboration, analysis, documentation, and maintenance of the various products developed during an entire software lifecycle. Its central component is an environment database in which properties about software objects and relations are collected. Two kinds of tools are provided: high-level tools and syntax-directed tools. A basic feature of the ALMA kernel is its genericity. Tools of the first kind are parameterized on software lifecycle models while tools of the second kind are parameterized on formalisms. Versions of specific models and formalisms are generated by a meta-environment, which also generates the environment database structure tailored to the desired lifecycle model. The database support meta-system and the instatiated database support systems it generates are emphasized, including the architectural design decisions made and the mechanisms introduced for achieving parameterization on lifecycle models     

Measuring the quality of the development lifecycle process

This paper proposes an approach to measuring the efficacy of the development process in terms of its ability to discover defects, and shows the metrics and forms of analysis which can be used to demonstrate this. Every activity in the development process has the capacity to both introduce and reveal defects. The efficacy of the process can be defined in terms of how soon after their introduction defects are discovered. To measure this, defects reported during each step are analysed to determine in which step the defect was introduced. A comparison of this defect distribution by introduction and detection step with the expected distribution indicates which aspects of the process are failing.     

Exploratory mining in cube space

Data Mining has evolved as a new discipline at the intersection of several existing areas, including Database Systems, Machine Learning, Optimization, and Statistics. An important question is whether the field has matured to the point where it has originated substantial new problems and techniques that distinguish it from its parent disciplines. In this paper, we discuss a class of new problems and techniques that show great promise for exploratory mining, while synthesizing and generalizing ideas from the parent disciplines. While the class of problems we discuss is broad, there is a common underlying objective—to look beyond a single data-mining step (e.g., data summarization or model construction) and address the combined process of data selection and transformation, parameter and algorithm selection, and model construction. The fundamental difficulty lies in the large space of alternative choices at each step, and good solutions must provide a natural framework for managing this complexity. We regard this as a grand challenge for Data Mining, and see the ideas discussed here as promising initial steps towards a rigorous exploratory framework that supports the entire process. Bee-Chung Chen is supported by a Microsoft Research graduate fellowship.     

Three hierarchies of transducers

Composition of top-down tree transducers yields a proper hierarchy of transductions and of output languages. The same is true for ETOL systems (viewed as transducers) and for two-way generalized sequential machines.     

Abstraction hierarchies in top-down design

This paper describes a program design discipline that has successfully produced well-modularized programs. The basic approach is to apply, in a uniform way, the concepts of data and procedural abstraction in a top-down decomposition during the initial programming-in-the-large phase of construction. This combination of data and procedural abstraction, called hybrid abstraction, views the system as composed almost entirely of abstract objects. The resulting structural design is partially expressed as a syntactic specification for a set of modules (a module being a set of objects) having no directly shared global data. In addition to the syntactic specification, the design expresses the abstract type decomposition and the structural relationships of the modules. Three relations on the set of modules define the hierarchies is called by, implements, and obtains resources from. These relations define the discipline and characterize the class of designs possible. Modules in practice are used in two different ways: single-instance use and multiple-instance use. Abstract objects can be of two different kinds: collection objects and singular objects. The relationships of these variations in module construction are illustrated. Three moderately large examples are shown. euclid is used to illustrate the discipline.     

State-of-the-art of long-term preservation in product lifecycle management

Providing access to digital information for the indefinite future is the intention of long-term digital preservation systems. One application domain that certainly needs to implement such long-term digital preservation processes is the design and engineering industry. In this industry, products are designed, manufactured, and operated with the help of sophisticated software tools provided by product lifecycle management (PLM) systems. During all PLM phases, including geographically distributed cross-domain and cross-company collaboration, a huge amount of heterogeneous digital product data and metadata is created. Legal and economic requirements demand that this product data has to be archived and preserved for a long-time period. Unfortunately, the software that is able to interpret the data will become obsolete earlier than the data since the software and hardware lifecycle is relatively short-lived compared to a product lifecycle. Companies in the engineering industry begin to realize that their data is in danger of becoming unusable while the products are in operation for several decades. To address this issue, different academic and industrial initiatives have been initiated that try to solve this problem. This article provides an overview of these projects including their motivations, identified problems, and proposed solutions. The studied projects are also verified against a classification of important aspects regarding scope and functionality of digital preservation in the engineering industry. Finally, future research topics are identified.     

Topological properties of the crossed cube architecture

Crossed cube is a variant obtained from the hypercube by redirecting a subset of the edges to span two or more dimensions. As a result, the diameter is reduced by half without increasing the link complexity. The use of the crossed cube as a parallel architecture, and in a reconfigurable system has been investigated earlier. The topological properties of the crossed cube are investigated in this paper. The main results of this paper include: an analysis of the number of isomorphic subgraphs, a formal proof for the diameter, and some new embedding properties.     

Changing the diameter of the locally twisted cube

The hypercube network Q _n has been proved to be one of the most popular interconnection networks. The n-dimensional locally twisted cube LTQ _n is an important variant of Q _n . One of the critical performance factors of an interconnection network is the diameter which determines the maximum communication time between any pair of processors. In this paper, we investigate the diameter variability problems arising from the addition and deletion of edges in LTQ _n . We obtain three results in this paper: (1) for any integer n≥2, we find the least number of edges (denoted by ch ^?(LTQ _n )), whose deletion from LTQ _n causes the diameter to increase, (2) for any integer n≥2, when ch ^?(LTQ _n ) edges are deleted, the diameter will increase by 1 and (3) for any integer n≥4, the least number of edges whose addition to LTQ _n will decrease the diameter is at most 2 ^n?1.     

Correlation and hierarchies in financial markets

As an emerging financial market, the trading value of carbon emission trading market has definitely increased in recent years. The carbon emission is not only trading in carbon emitters but also has become an important investment target. To determine the mechanism of this growing market, we analyzed the EU allowances (EUA) price series in European Climate Exchange (ECX) that is the leading European emissions futures market. As other financial market, the absolute value of price change (volatility) in carbon emission trading market also shows long-term power-law correlations. Our analysis shows that definite cross correlations exist between EUA and many other markets. These cross correlations exist in wild-range fields, stock market index, futures of crude, sugar, cocoa, etc., suggesting that in this new carbon emission trading market the speculation behavior had already become a main factor that can affect the price change.     

Finding inheritance hierarchies in fuzzy-valued concept-networks

In this paper, we extend the works of Chen and Horng (1996) and Itzkovich and Hawkes (1994) to present a new method for finding the inheritance hierarchies in fuzzy-valued concept-networks, where the relevant values (degrees of generalization or degrees of similarity) between concepts in a fuzzy-valued concept network are represented by fuzzy numbers. The proposed method is more flexible than the ones presented previously due to the fact that it allows the grades of similarity and the grades of generalization between concepts to be represented by fuzzy numbers rather than crisp real values between zero and one or interval values in [0,1].     

The structures of power hierarchies

On the basis of analytical research of the base model of treelike hierarchies, various problems of reforming power structures are considered. With the help of corresponding computing experiments which were made for the solution of some problems of optimization of power systems, optimal (in a certain sense) structures of power hierarchies were defined and the consequences of applying a particular reforming strategy were estimated.     

Continuous prediction of manufacturing performance throughout the production lifecycle

We describe methods for continual prediction of manufactured product quality prior to final testing. In our most expansive modeling approach, an estimated final characteristic of a product is updated after each manufacturing operation. Our initial application is for the manufacture of microprocessors, and we predict final microprocessor speed. Using these predictions, early corrective manufacturing actions may be taken to increase the speed of expected slow wafers (a collection of microprocessors) or reduce the speed of fast wafers. Such predictions may also be used to initiate corrective supply chain management actions. Developing statistical learning models for this task has many complicating factors: (a) a temporally unstable population (b) missing data that is a result of sparsely sampled measurements and (c) relatively few available measurements prior to corrective action opportunities. In a real manufacturing pilot application, our automated models selected 125 fast wafers in real-time. As predicted, those wafers were significantly faster than average. During manufacture, downstream corrective processing restored 25 nominally unacceptable wafers to normal operation.     

Minimum neighborhood in a generalized cube

Generalized cubes are a subclass of hypercube-like networks, which include some hypercube variants as special cases. Let θG(k) denote the minimum number of nodes adjacent to a set of k vertices of a graph G. In this paper, we prove for each n-dimensional generalized cube and each integer k satisfying n+2?k?2n. Our result is an extension of a result presented by Fan and Lin [J. Fan, X. Lin, The t/k-diagnosability of the BC graphs, IEEE Trans. Comput. 54 (2) (2005) 176-184].     

Construction of robust class hierarchies

This article discusses the problem of constructing robust class libraries. Further design criteria include the flexibility of class libraries, the efficiency of the implementations, and their safe extensibility. We show that it is possible to design robust libraries to satisfy any two of the requirements at the same time. Although the solution may require an exponential growth in the number of classes compared to the original design, this apparent class explosion can be controlled by generating only the necessary additional classes automatically. As an application demonstrating both the theoretical problems and the power of our generator approach, the design of a library modelling data structures and algorithms for graphs is considered. Both the discussion and the results in this article generalize to other domains. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.