Model-independent schema translation

Abstract

We discuss a proposal for the implementation of the model management operator ModelGen, which translates schemas from one model to another, for example from object-oriented to SQL or from SQL to XML Schema Descriptions. The operator can be used to generate database wrappers (e.g., object-oriented or XML to relational), default user interfaces (e.g., relational to forms), or default database schemas from other representations. The approach translates schemas from a model to another, within a predefined, but large and extensible, set of models: given a source schema S expressed in a source model, and a target model TM, it generates a schema S expressed in TM that is "equivalent" to S. A wide family of models is handled by using a metamodel in which models can be succinctly and precisely described. The approach expresses the translation as Datalog rules and exposes the source and target of the translation in a generic relational dictionary. This makes the translation transparent, easy to customize and model-independent. The proposal includes automatic generation of translations as composition of basic steps.

A Functional Model for Dataspace Management Systems

“…Broadly construed to encompass systems that are primarily concerned with matching management or with mapping management, as well as the full gamut of model management capabilities, the area has produced impressive research systems such as COMA [19,4], Clio [55,56,16,34] (some of whose contributions have been incorporated into DB2), AutoMed [12,11,58], Rondo [54,53,51], GeRoMe [40] and MISM/MIDST [2,3], among others.…”

“…Inspiration for Fig. 3 Relating databases, data integration, model management and dataspaces this work was drawn primarily from the work on model management, particularly [2,3,54,53,51]. As we have pointed out, different formulations of the same conception than the one described below (e.g., drawing inspiration from [40] or [12,11,58]) are possible and, possibly, as desirable.…”

“…The intensional description of a data resource d ∈ D draws a finite set C(d) ⊂ Σ comprising three pairwise disjoint subsets SL(d), SA(d) and SR(d) containing the symbols used as identifiers of, respectively (and in the terminology of [3]) superlexicals (e.g., attributes, in the relational data model), superabstracts (e.g., relations) and superrelationships (e.g., primary-foreign key pairings), respectively.…”

Uniform Access to Non-relational Database Systems: The SOS Platform

“…The programming model is based on a high-level description of the interfaces of non-relational systems by means of a generic and extensible meta-layer, based on principles that are inspired by those our group has used in the MIDST and MIDST-RT projects [2][3][4]. The focus in our previous work was on the structure of models and was mainly devoted to the definition of techniques to translate from a representation to another one.…”

Ontological Metamodeling with Explicit Instantiation

“…We envision at least two promising applications of this approach: interoperability in the line of [3] and enhancing the set of transformation scenarios in MDE as described in [16]. These two applications together with a proper formalization of OGML are the main directions for a future research.…”