Evolving databases: an application to electronic commerce

Many complex and dynamic database applications such as product modeling and negotiation monitoring require a number of features that have been adopted in semantic models and databases such as active rules, constraints, inheritance, etc. Unfortunately, each feature has largely been considered in isolation. Furthermore, in a commercial negotiation, participants staking their financial well beings will never accept a system they cannot gain a precise behavioral understanding of. We attack these problems with a rich and extensible database model, evolving databases, with a clear and precise semantics based on evolving algebras (E. Borger, 1994). We also briefly describe a prototype implementation of the model (B. Fordham et al.).