Model Management

The goal of model management is to develop a generic infrastructure that offers an order-of-magnitude productivity improvement to builders of model-driven applications, such as database tools, application design tools, message translators, and customizable commercial applications.

We have worked on both abstract operators that manipulate models and mappings and on practical applications of this technology. Abstract operators include the following:·

• Match – returns correspondences between elements of two given schemas
• Merge – returns an integration of two models based on a mapping
• Compose – returns the composition of two mappings
• ModelGen – translates a schema from one metamodel to another

Related practical problems that we have worked on include the following

• Schema matcher – we developed the automated schema-matching algorithm in Microsoft’s BizTalk Mapper
• Object-to-relational mapping – we helped develop the mapping compiler for Microsoft’s ADO.NET Entity Framework
• Relational to object-oriented reverse engineering – we developed a tool that produces an Entity Data Model schema (with inheritance) from a SQL schema

We recently extended the Entity Framework schema-mapping compiler to perform incremental compilation, which appeared at SIGMOD 2013.

Past Contributors: Sergey Melnik, Suad Alagic, Paolo Atzeni, Alon Halevy, Renee Miller, Christine Parent, Christoph Quix, Lemonia Ragia, Erhard Rahm, Guillem Rull, Vadim Savenkov, Stefano Spaccapietra, Adi Unnithan.

Past Interns: Paolo Cappellari, Ivo Garcia dos Santos, Todd J. Green, Marie Jacob, Yannis Katsis, Jayant Madhavan, Ankit Malpani, Peter Mork, Arnab Nandi, Alan Nash, Nicola Onose, Jorge Perez, Michalis Petropoulos, Rachel Pottinger, and Soujanya Vadapalli.