Data Warehousing Scenarios for Model Management

Model management is a framework for supporting meta-data related applications where models and mappings are manipulated as first class objects using operations such as Match, Merge, ApplyFunction, and Compose. To demonstrate the approach, we show how to use model management in two scenarios related to loading data warehouses. The case study illustrates the value of model management as a methodology for approaching meta-data related problems. It also helps clarify the required semantics of key operations. These detailed scenarios provide evidence that generic model management is useful and, very likely, implementable

Towards Domain-Oriented Semi-Automated Model Matching for Supporting Data Exchange

The process of matching data represented in two different data models is a longstanding issue in the exchange of data between different software systems. While the traditional manual matching approach cannot meet today’s demands on data exchange, research shows that a fully automated generic approach for model matching is not likely, and generic semi-automated approaches are not easy to implement. In this paper, we present an approach that focuses on matching data models in a specific domain. The approach combines a basic model matching approach and a version matching approach to deduce new matching rules to enable data transfer between two evolving data models

A survey of approaches to automatic schema matching

Schema matching is a basic problem in many database application domains, such as data integration, E-business, data warehousing, and semantic query processing. In current implementations, schema matching is typically performed manually, which has significant limitations. On the other hand, previous research papers have proposed many techniques to achieve a partial automation of the match operation for specific application domains. We present a taxonomy that covers many of these existing approaches, and we describe the approaches in some detail. In particular, we distinguish between schema-level and instance-level, element-level and structure-level, and language-based and constraint-based matchers. Based on our classification we review some previous match implementations thereby indicating which part of the solution space they cover. We intend our taxonomy and review of past work to be useful when comparing different approaches to schema matching, when developing a new match algorithm, and when implementing a schema matching component

Finding compositions of transformations for software re-use

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, Technology and Policy Program, 2007.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 77-83).As organizations collect and store more information, data integration is becoming increasingly problematic. For example, nearly 70% of respondents to a recent global survey of IT workers and business users called data integration a high inhibitor of new application implementation. A number of frameworks and tools have been developed to enable data integration tasks. The most prominent include schema matching, use of ontologies and logic-based techniques. A joint project by UFL and MIT, Morpheus, has attacked the same problem with a unique emphasis on re-use and sharing. In the first part of the thesis, we try to define software re-use and sharing in the context of data integration and contrast this approach with existing integration techniques. We synthesize previous work in the field with our experience demoing Morpheus to an audience of research labs and companies. At the heart of a system with re-usable components is browsing and searching capabilities. The second part of this thesis describes TransformScout, a transform composition search engine that automates composition of re-usable components. Similarity and quality metrics have been formulated for recommending the users with a ranked collection of composite transforms. In addition, the system learns from user feedback to improve the quality of the query results. We conducted a user study to both evaluate Morpheus as a system and to assess TransformScout's performance in helping completing programming tasks. Results indicate that software re-use with Morpheus and TransformScout has helped the user perform the programming tasks faster. Moreover, TransformScout was useful in aiding the users with completing the tasks more reliably.by Mujde Pamuk.S.M