Abstract. Bidirectional transformations (bx) constitute an emerging mechanism for maintaining the consistency of interdependent sources of information in soft- ware systems. Researchers from many different communities have recently in- vestigated the use of bxto solve a large variety of problems, including relational view update, schema evolution, data exchange, database migration, and model co-evolution, just to name a few. Each community leveraged and extended dif- ferent theoretical frameworks and tailored their use for specific sub-problems. Unfortunately, the question of how these approaches actually relate to and differ from each other remains unanswered. This question should be addressed to re- duce replicated efforts among and even within communities, enabling more effec- tive collaboration and fostering cross-fertilization. To effectively move forward, a systematization of these many theories and systems is now required. This paper constitutes a first, humble yet concrete step towards a unified theoretical frame- work for a tractable and relevant subset of bx approaches and tools. It identifies, characterizes, and compares tools that allow the incremental definition of bidi- rectional mappings between software artifacts. Identifying similarities between such tools yields the possibility of developing practical tools with wide-ranging applicability; identifying differences allows for potential new research directions, applying the strengths of one tool to another whose strengths lie elsewhere.
@inproceedings{terwilliger2012howclean, author = {James F. Terwilliger and Anthony Cleve and Carlo Curino}, title = {How Clean Is Your Sandbox? - Towards a Unified Theoretical Framework for Incremental Bidirectional Transformations}, booktitle = {ICMT}, year = {2012}, pages = {1-23}, ee = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-30476-7_1},
}