“Information Systems Integration and Evolution: Ontologies at Rescue”, Carlo A. Curino, Letizia Tanca, Carlo Zaniolo International Workshop on Semantic Technologies for System Maintenance (STSM) 2008
The life of a modern Information System is often characterized by integration with other systems, and continuous evolution of their data management core, to face unexpected changes in its requirements. Most of the solutions dealing with these issues from a database perspective rely on the notions of mapping and query rewriting. This paper presents the research agenda of ADAM (Advanced Data And Metadata Manager), a unified framework which, harvesting recent theoretical advances in this area, will deliver practical solutions for automatic schema mapping and graceful schema evolution. Information Systems evolution reflects changes in the model of their business reality; in the ADAM project we exploit ontologies to capture such changes in order to provide traceability and documentation of the evolution. Initial results and immediate benefits of this approach are presented.
Paper available at: curino-STSM08-CR.pdf