Databases often constitute the most critical component in information systems of private and public companies. The lack of documentation and some empirical practices of development makes difficult the comprehension of databases structures. However this semantic comprehension is essential for performing any significant modification such as evolution, migration, integration or web publication of a database.
The CETIC Database research section focuses its activities on two domains : reverse engineering of information systems and XML engineering.
On the basis of this expertise, the CETIC provides a technical and methodological assistance to service firms, but also to private and public companies in their projects of information systems reingeniery.
Reverse engineering of information systems
The main objective of reverse-engineering is to rebuild the technical and functional documentation of a database starting from a systematic analysis of multiple relevant sources of information, such as the code used for defining data structures, the programs exploiting the data, the application screens or forms, some parts of the documentation possibly available, and the data themselves. The systems based on the Web constitute a real database with public access. The poor structure of these data and the lack of methodology in web sites design make their reingeniery particularly difficult.
Our main activities in reverse engineering are :
developing a method to extract from a web site the data and their schemas;
building tools supporting that method;
validating method and tools via real-size case studies
XML engineering
In the past few years, XML has become a standard format in data exchange on the web. We develop methods and tools to assist the structuration of XML documents by generating XML data definition code (DTD or XML Schemas) from a conceptual data schema.
These methods are supported by tools implemented for the DB-Main environment, a CASE tool developed by the Laboratory of Database application engineering at the University of Namur.
