Concepts and Techniques for an Active Database Approach to Office Procedure Support

摘要

Administrative processes in office environments often consist of complex procedures specifying tasks to be executed and dependencies between them. Office automation systems support these office procedures by providing powerful and flexible transaction processing facilities. The report proposes a technique for office procedure support called 'automatic transaction invocation.' This technique makes use of standard active database concepts for the specification and implementation of complex office procedures. The technique provides separate high-level specification of transactions describing the elementary office tasks, and dependency rules between transactions describing the overall structure of the office procedure application, including detailed timing requirements. The concepts of the technique can easily be mapped onto a graph-based representation, allowing an attractive means for design and analysis of complex applications.