One of the research areas of the Department of Computer & Decision Engineering concerns information systems. Since several years the department has been involved in the development of the MADS conceptual model, an extension of the Entity-Relationship model for representing spatial, temporal, and multi-representation features. One of the characteristics of the MADS model is that it covers both data definition as well as query and update facilities. More recently, the department has been working in the development of the MultiDim model, an extension of the Entity-Relationship model for representing multi-dimensional data, i.e., data that is contained in data warehouses. Finally, the department is also actively involved in Semantic Web, especially in the areas of ontologies, web services and XML querying.
The subjects presented below covers these areas. Notice that this list of subjects is not exhaustive, the students interested in these topics are invited to propose original subjects.
The Object Constraint Language (OCL), part of the UML standard, is a formal language for defining constraints on UML models. The Dresden OCL toolkit is an open source software platform for OCL tool support. One of the tools comprising the OCL toolkit is OCL2SQL, an SQL code generator that generates an SQL check constraint, assertion or trigger for an OCL invariant. OCL2SQL can be used and adapted for different relational database systems and different object-to-table mappings.
The objective of the project is to extend the toolkit for taking into account spatial, temporal and multi-representation constraints, as those proposed by the MADS model.
eXist is a very active Open Source project to develop a native XML database system with index-based XQuery processing. The database is completely written in Java and may be deployed in a number of ways, either running as a stand-alone server process, inside a servlet-engine, or directly embedded into an application.
The objective of the project is to extend the eXist database and XQuery language for taking into account multidimensional data, i.e., to enable XML for data warehouse applications. Two previous master theses developed a group-by extension for XQuery that is now integrated into eXist.
This project can be subdivided in several master theses :
L'intégration de méthodes multicritères dans des systèmes d'information géographiques (SIG) est devenue très populaire ces dernières années car elle permet de traiter des problèmes spatiaux complexes présentant des critères (ou points de vues) conflictuels.
De nombreux travaux ont été réalisés, mais de nombreuses lacunes subsistent. L'une d'entre elles est de permettre à un utilisateur inexpérimenté de facilement définir un problème spatial multicritère pouvant être ensuite résolu par un solveur ou un programme dédié.
Le but du MFE sera de définir un langage de description basé sur XML (eXtensible Markup Language) en tirant parti des standards existants (GML, KML, UMDA-ML, …) et des travaux de recherches ayant été publiés sur les problèmes spatiaux (typologies, …). L'étudiant implémentera également un parseur en PHP capable de lire ou générer des fichiers utilisant ce langage.
Compétences requises : Développement web (PHP), recherche opérationnelle
Mots-clés : Web sémantique, bases de données géographiques, ingénierie de la décision