Applying ECA-Rules in DB-based Design Environments

The goal of this paper is to bring together the worlds of design and active databases. Design databases have to provide a powerful data model for complex structured design data as well as a powerful activity model asserting basic data consistency and supporting workflow (in the design area we should better call it designflow) and cooperation among designers. There are numerous potential application areas for ECA rules within design demanding to incorporate active capabilities into design databases. We argue that ECA rules are well suited for error correction purposes providing a forward oriented handling of failure situations, even for repairing inconsistencies which were caused by cooperative data access. We will further argue that ECA rules do not suite for pre-planning, specifying, or implementing designflows. Beside these two areas, there are several application fields in design which can be supported by ECA rules, but the requirements of which could also be fulfilled by alternative mechanisms.