Lecture: "Model Management: A Schema Mapping Infrastructure for Data Integration"
Philip A. Bernstein
Microsoft Research
Principal Researcher in the Microsoft Research Database Group
Faculty Host: Gerome Miklau
"Model Management: A Schema Mapping Infrastructure for Data Integration"
In today's large enterprises, meta data management problems consume a large fraction of the development and maintenance of complex data-integration applications, such as data warehouses, application integration, and B2B e-commerce. Despite decades of research on database support for these problems, solutions are problem-specific and data-model-specific, and they require much object-at-a-time programming.
To make solutions more generic and easier to program, we propose a high level interface, called Model Management. Its main operators include Match, Merge, Diff, ModelGen, TransGen, and Compose. These operators manipulate models and mappings as bulk objects. A model is a complex information structure, such as a relational schema, XML schema, UML model, or program interface. A mapping represents a transformation between instances of two models, such as a logic formula or database query. Given models and/or mappings, an operator produces other models and/or mappings.
We explain the main operators, summarize what's known about them, and show how to use them to solve a classical meta data management problem: schema evolution. We then describe a recent practical application of the work to the generation of object-to-relational wrappers, a major component of most packaged database applications.
Philip A. Bernstein is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Corporation. Over the past 30 years, he has been a product architect at Microsoft and at Digital Equipment Corp., a professor at Harvard University and Wang Institute of Graduate Studies, and a VP Software at Sequoia Systems. During that time, he has published over 100 articles on the theory and implementation of database systems, and two books on transaction processing. He is an ACM Fellow, a winner of the SIGMOD Innovations Award, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.
