A Visual Specification Tool for Event-Condition-Action Rules Supporting Web-Based Distributed System

Specifying Event-Condition-Action (ECA) rules is an important issue in the domain of active database. Current specification tools for ECA rules include visual specification tools and textual specification tools based on XML. Here, the visualization of ECA rules provides an easy-to-use interface in design/analysis tools for active database queries while the XML-based representation allows the exchange of ECA rules in a web-based distributed environment. Thus, a specification tool with advantages of both visual representation and XML-based representation is needed. In this paper we present and implement a new visual specification tool for ECA rules, called VSTE, to address this issue. We also use a web-based smart home system to evaluate our work.