Supporting executable mappings in model management

Abstract

Model management is an approach to simplify the programming of metadata-intensive applications. It offers developers powerful operators, such as Compose, Diff, and Merge, that are applied to models, such as database schemas or interface specifications, and to mappings between models. Prior model management solutions focused on a simple class of mappings that do not have executable semantics. Yet many metadata applications require that mappings be executable, expressed in SQL, XSLT, or other data transformation languages.In this paper, we develop a semantics for model-management operators that allows applying the operators to executable mappings. Our semantics captures previously-proposed desiderata and is language-independent: the effect of the operators is expressed in terms of what they do to the instances of models and mappings. We describe an implemented prototype in which mappings are represented as dependencies between relational schemas, and discuss algebraic optimization of model-management scripts.