Keywords: engineering information, engineering collaborative work, data mediation, active database management system, Event-Condition-Action database rule, synchronisation, distribution.

Modern products are often the outcome of a collaborating development effort of many developers originating from many different engineering domains. Team members working in distributed engineering collaborative work need to have the capability to share and exchange design information and ideas. This work presents an active database approach to enable exchange of engineering information among distributed team members in a timely manner. A prototype system is built that support mechanical computer aided engineering (MCAE) where engineers engaged in different engineering analyses at different locations interactively can work on the same solid model at the same time. By interfacing a database management system that supports active database rules and peer-to-peer communication, information mediation among team members and MCAE systems can be supported. Updates made in one MCAE system are actively identified and only updates are distributed to other peer MCAE systems. This means that the information that resides in the distributed MCAE systems is automatically synchronised.

The benefits of the current approach include the followings:

• This approach can ensure that all team members have up-to-date and consistent information as database rules actively monitor the data, and database mediators immediately respond to inter-database requests. It can also improve the functionality of distributed engineering applications since every team member can have full access to all information locally. This model reduces the necessary data transfer at updates by sending only updated data to other team members in comparison to approaches where the complete model is distributed at updates.
• General capabilities of the DBMS, such as storage management, data modelling, meta-data, query language, query processing, and transactions can provide an efficient data management to, for instance, avoid data redundancy and data inconsistencies, optimize data manipulation, as well as to support concurrency control through transactions management.
• Mediation capabilities provide mechanisms to monitor, transform, combine, locate and query data between applications and data sources. This results in more powerful methods for sharing engineering information. Furthermore, built-in communication primitives of the DBMS facilitate the development of a distributed P2P engineering information system.

Furthermore, mediation capabilities provide mechanisms to monitor, transform, combine, locate and query data between applications and data sources. This results in more powerful methods for sharing engineering information.

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