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Schema reintegration using generic schema manipulation operators

University of British Columbia

Schemas are very likely to be changed from time to time because of requirement changes, design revisions, database migration and such scenarios. Especially in a multi-user environment, schemas may be used by different groups or people and are modified to different versions. At some point in time, it is necessary to reintegrate the different versions and have a final unique version of the schema. Basically, the problem of creating the unique version is to merge the modified schemas. Previous works on schema merging describe how to merge two schemas given the mapping between them. In those works, the two schemas need not come from a common source schema. In fact, the original schema is often unavailable. However, in our scenario, we have the original schema, and we use it in decision-making. This simplifies what might otherwise be a complex matching procedure. We attempt to find a generic solution to the schema reintegration problem (i.e., when the original schema is present). In this thesis, we created a framework that implemented the schema reintegration algorithms using generic model management operators. These generic operators have been widely mentioned and explained abstractly in many previous papers. Here we have implemented each operator required, which necessitated formally defining and creating the algorithm for each operator used for this specific schema re-integration purpose. Our contributions are: (a) determining that the generic operators can be used for schema reintegration, and (b) designing, implementing, and analyzing the model management operators used in details.

Text

2010-01-20

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/18732

Computer Science

University of British Columbia

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