A semantic-based nested transaction model for intelligent and cooperative information systems

Intelligent and cooperative information systems (ICIS) involve upgraded models for transaction support for large distributed data/knowledge intensive applications. The use of long-lived transactions results in the introduction of a flexible transaction model which employs weak integrity and optimistic commit mechanisms for transactions relying on compensating and contingency transactions to recover from potential semantic failures. An open-nested transaction model for ICIS is introduced. It provides linguistic facilities for defining and controlling long-lived complex transactions (comprising related units of work) by taking into account the semantics of distributed computations. The fact that the proposed transaction model is grafted on to an appropriately extended concurrent object-oriented programming language allows exhibiting a high degree of parallelism inherent in distributed transaction-oriented applications