Component Approach to Software Development for Distributed Multi-Database System

The paper deals with a component based approach for software development in a distributed environment for the database retrieval operations. A Core Component for a distributed multi-database system has been proposed. The core Component is modeled using three interfaces User, Administrator and Databases Handler. The User Interface is the starting point of access for the Core Component. The Administrator interface deals with access control privileges for users and local databases. The Database Handler facilitates global schema management and site management.Assertion, Core Component, Component Based Software Development, Multi-Database, Schema

Information Systems Evolution: A Process Model for Integrating New Services

Integration of different components that compose enterprise Information System (IS) represents a big challenge in the IS development. However, it is indispensable in order to avoid fragmentation of the IS and redundancy between different IS applications. In this work we consider service-driven IS engineering as a prospective approach to deal with IS fragmentation and interoperability of different IS components. We introduce the notion of Information System Service (ISS) and propose a process model supporting legacy IS evolution by integration of new services. We claim that such an approach has to take into account a large number of integration situations and therefore has to be built by applying situational method engineering principals and defined as a collection of reusable method chunks

Building high-quality merged ontologies from multiple sources with requirements customization

Ontologies are the prime way of organizing data in the Semantic Web. Often, it is necessary to combine several, independently developed ontologies to obtain a knowledge graph fully representing a domain of interest. Existing approaches scale rather poorly to the merging of multiple ontologies due to using a binary merge strategy. Thus, we aim to investigate the extent to which the n-ary strategy can solve the scalability problem. This thesis contributes to the following important aspects: 1. Our n-ary merge strategy takes as input a set of source ontologies and their mappings and generates a merged ontology. For efficient processing, rather than successively merging complete ontologies pairwise, we group related concepts across ontologies into partitions and merge first within and then across those partitions. 2. We take a step towards parameterizable merge methods. We have identified a set of Generic Merge Requirements (GMRs) that merged ontologies might be expected to meet. We have investigated and developed compatibilities of the GMRs by a graph-based method. 3. When multiple ontologies are merged, inconsistencies can occur due to different world views encoded in the source ontologies To this end, we propose a novel Subjective Logic-based method to handling the inconsistency occurring while merging ontologies. We apply this logic to rank and estimate the trustworthiness of conflicting axioms that cause inconsistencies within a merged ontology. 4. To assess the quality of the merged ontologies systematically, we provide a comprehensive set of criteria in an evaluation framework. The proposed criteria cover a variety of characteristics of each individual aspect of the merged ontology in structural, functional, and usability dimensions. 5. The final contribution of this research is the development of the CoMerger tool that implements all aforementioned aspects accessible via a unified interface

Generic schema merging

Abstract. Schema merging is the process of integrating several schemas into a common, unified schema. There have been various approaches to schema merging, metamodel. Having a semantically rich representation of models and mappings is particularly important for merging as semantic information is required to resolve the conflicts encountered. Therefore, our approach to schema merging is based on the generic role-based metamodel GeRoMe and intensional mappings based on the real world states of model elements. We give a formal definition of the merged schema and present an algorithm implementing these formalizations.