Ariane: An Awareness Mechanism for Shared Databases

摘要

Awareness is an essential requirement in collaborative activities. This paper presents Ariane, a generic and reusable awareness infrastructure, independent of a specific application or DBMS. Ariane improves the availability of awareness information to different cooperative applications by monitoring the application persistence mechanism. A prototype of Ariane was developed using the Java Data Objects (JDO) persistence mechanism and aspect-oriented programming techniques, which were employed in order to increase the potential reusability of the solution. A preliminary evaluation of the prototype, applied in an environment for cooperative software development based on components, confirmed that no additional code is necessary to monitor JDO complaint applications. Besides, Ariane proposes a multidimensional data structure for awareness information, the awareness cube. On-line analytical processing tools can be employed to perform queries to retrieve aggregated value from small grained awareness information.