Correctness of Incremental Model Synchronization with Triple Graph Grammars

In model-driven software development, we may have several models describing the same system or artifact, by providing different views on it. In this case, we say that these models are consistently integrated. Triple Graph Grammars (TGGs), defined by Schürr, are a general and powerful tool to describe (bidirectional) model transformations. In this context, model synchronization is the operation that, given two consistent models and an update or modification of one of them, finds the corresponding update on the other model, so that consistency is restored. There are different approaches to describe this operation in terms of TGGs, but most of them have a computational cost that depends on the size of the given models. In general this may be very costly since these models may be quite large. To avoid this problem, Giese and Wagner have advocated for the need of incremental synchronization procedures, meaning that their cost should depend only on the size of the given update. In particular they proposed one such procedure. Unfortunately, the correctness of their approach is not studied and, anyhow, it could only be ensured under severe restrictions on the kind of TGGs considered. In the work presented, we study the problem from a different point of view. First, we discuss what it means for a procedure to be incremental, defining a correctness notion that we call incremental consistency. Moreover, we present a general incremental synchronization procedure and we show its correctness, completeness and incrementality.Peer Reviewe

Reverse Engineering User Interfaces for Interactive Database Conceptual Analysis

Acceptance rate: 15%, Rank (CORE): AInternational audienceThe first step of most database design methodologies consists in eliciting part of the user requirements from various sources such as user interviews and corporate documents. These requirements formalize into a conceptual schema of the application domain, that has proved to be difficult to validate, especially since the visual representation of the ER model has shown understandability limitations from the end-users standpoint. In contrast, we claim that prototypical user interfaces can be used as a two-way channel to efficiently express, capture and validate data requirements. Considering these interfaces as a possibly populated physical view on the database to be developed, reverse engineering techniques can be applied to derive their underlying conceptual schema. We present an interactive tool-supported approach to derive data requirements from user interfaces. This approach, based on an intensive user involvement, addresses a significant subset of data requirements, especially when combined with other requirement elicitation techniques