DXEC: integrating database, XML and email for collaboration

This paper introduces DXEC, a database, XML and email enabled framework for better collaborative work. The framework use emails as the main collaboration medium, which are mainly generated automatically by OA applications and groupware systems. But instead of using them naively, each email in the system are wrapped in a XML envelop, which provides superior searching and filtering ability. Emails are stored in a XML enable database, and a XML filter engine is used to filter the incoming messages and disseminate them to relevant audiences. User profile in XPath, which can be specified by hand and refined through feedbacks, are used by the filter engine to ensure everyone received only interested messages. In this paper, we present the architecture of DXEC and introduce major components and important algorithms. We also demonstrate its use in software development process.