Model Management

Overview

The working group Model Management discusses research and applications of model management technologies. Model management aims at developing technologies and mechanisms to support the integration, merging, evolution, and matching of complex data models. This support is required for the management of complex, integrated, distributed, heterogeneous information systems. Basic concepts in model management are models, mappings and operators. Models (e.g. an XML Schema, a schema of a relational database, or an ontology in OWL) describe the structure of data. Mappings represent relationships between elements from different models. Operators are operations on models and mappings (e.g. merging & matching of models, composition of mapping).

The management of metadata is of particular importance for model management. Metadata is data about data and is becoming more and more important as distributed and heterogeneous information systems need to be integrated. Using a metadata-based approach in the design and implementation of an integrated information system increases the flexibility and adaptability of the system, as information about the structure of data models and their dependencies are not hidden in the source code of the system. Instead, this information is captured in semantically rich metadata models, which enable the (re)use of the information in various contexts. Furthermore, a semantically rich representation of data models supports the definition of model management operators.

The working group addresses the following topics in more detail.

Meta Database Systems

The ConceptBase system is a deductive, object-oriented meta database system. It is based on the conceptual modelling language O-Telos. The system is available free-of-charge for non-commercial purposes. Current work focuses on the improvement of the graphical user interface (in particular, the graphical editor), interfaces to other modelling languages (such as XML Schema or OWL) and other database systems, and ongoing improvement of the ConceptBase kernel system.

Formal Representation of Models and Mappings

A fundamental problem of model management is a formal representation of models and mappings between these models. The formal representation should enable the definition of operators in an efficient and correct way. Our current goal is to define a generic meta model that is able to represent data models in various modeling languages (such as SQL DDL, XML Schema, or OWL).

Schema Matching

Mappings between models are required for many operations in model management. The manual construction of such mappings can be a tedious task, if the models contain thousands of elements. Therefore, (semi-)automatic mechanisms are required to support the creation of mappings. We are currently developing a system for the matching of ontologies.

Quality-Oriented Data Integration

Within a company, data is managed in several systems with different data models and characteristics. However, an integrated view of the data is required to get a comprehensive overview of the state of the organization. This might also include the integration of external sources. In this context, the quality of the data in the various sources has also to be considered. Several sources might provide the same data but with different quality characteristics (e.g. correctness, accuracy, response time of the source). An algorithm for the quality-oriented data integration has been developed in this thesis. We currently plan an implementation of this algorithm using Semantic Web and Grid technologies (see below).

Semantic Web

The vision of the Semantic Web is to have semantic annotations of the data, which is available on the web. This supports the search and integration of the data, as the data can be located by their semantical description and not only by their syntactical representation (e.g. keyword based search). Data integration and data quality are also problems in this context. Grid and P2P systems can be seen as the underlying technologies which enable the implementation of distributed information systems based on the idea of the Semantic Web. Research in this field is currently done in the context of the EU IST project SEWASIE.

Joining the Working Group

If you are interested in joining the working group on Model Management, please contact Christoph Quix. Students can join the group as a student assistant (Hiwi) or do their bachelor/diploma/master thesis in this research area. Seminars and lab courses are planned for future terms.

Currently avalable topics for a bachelor/diploma/master thesis are listed below, the same for student research assistant (HiWi) job openings.

GeRoMeSuite

Publications

2011

• Fisnik Kastrati, Xiang Li, Christoph Quix, Mohammadreza Khelghati

  Enabling Structured Queries over Unstructured Documents

  Published in International Workshop on Semantic based Opportunistic Data Management (SODM 2011), in conjunction with the 12th IEEE International Conference on Mobile Data Management (MDM 2011), Lulea, Sweden, 2011

• Xiang Li, Christoph Quix, David Kensche, Sandra Geisler, Lisong Guo

  Automatic Mediated Schema Generation Through Reasoning Over Data Dependencies

  Published in Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Data Engineering, ICDE 2011, April 11-16, 2011, Hannover, Germany.

• Christoph Quix, Pratanu Roy, David Kensche

  Automatic Selection of Background Knowledge for Ontology Matching

  Published in 3rd International Workshop on Semantic Web Information Management (SWIM 2011, in conjunction with ACM SIGMOD 2011), June 12, 2011, Athens, Greece

2010

• Christoph Quix, Marko Pascan, Pratanu Roy, David Kensche

  Semantic Matching of Ontologies

  Published in Fifth International Workshop on Ontology Matching (OM-2010), Shanghai, China, 2010

• Christoph Quix, Avigdor Gal, Tomer Sagi, David Kensche

  An integrated matching system: GeRoMeSuite and SMB - Results for OAEI 2010

  Published in Fifth International Workshop on Ontology Matching (OM-2010), Shanghai, China, 2010

• Xiang Li

  Towards a Unified Framework for Schema Merging

  Published in VLDB 2010 PhD Workshop. Singapore, September 13-17, 2010.

• Xiang Li, Christoph Quix, David Kensche, Sandra Geisler

  Automatic Schema Merging Using Mapping Constraints Among Incomplete Sources

  Published in Proceedings of the 19th ACM international conference on Information and knowledge management (CIKM'10), October 26-30, 2010, Toronto, ON, Canada.

• Sandra Geisler, Christoph Quix, A. Schmeink, David Kensche

  Ontology-based Data Integration: A Case Study in Clinical Trials

  Published in C. Plant, C. Böhm (eds.): Database Technology for Life Sciences and Medicine. Word Scientific Publishing, 2010.

• A. Schmeink, Sandra Geisler, A. Brauers, Christoph Quix

  A Method and Module for Linking Data of a Data Source to a Target Database

  Published in Patent Application, No. PCT/IB2009/055537

• Mohamed Chatti, Matthias Jarke, Christoph Quix

  Connectivism: the network metaphor of learning

  Published in International Journal of Learning Technology 2010 - Vol. 5, No.1 pp. 80 - 99

• David Kensche, Christoph Quix, Xiang Li, Sandra Geisler

  Solving ORM by MAGIC: MApping GeneratIon and Composition

  Published in Alan Dearle, Roberto Zicari (Eds.): Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Objects and Databases (ICOODB), Frankfurt/Main, Germany, September 28-30, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), vol. 6348, Springer, 2010.

2009

• Christoph Quix

  Meta Data Repository

  Published in M. Tamer Özsu, Ling Liu (eds.): Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, 2009.

• Christoph Quix, Xiang Li, David Kensche, Sandra Geisler

  View Management Techniques and Their Application to Data Stream Management

  Published in P. Furtado (ed.): Evolving Application Domains of Data Warehousing and Mining - Trends and Solutions, Information Science Reference, pp. 83-112, 2009.

• Christoph Quix

  Model Management

  Published in M. Tamer Özsu, Ling Liu (eds.): Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, 2009.

• Christoph Quix, Sandra Geisler, David Kensche, Xiang Li

  Results of GeRoMeSuite for OAEI 2009

  Published in Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Ontology Matching (OM-2009), Collocated with the 8th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC-2009) Chantilly, USA, October 25, 2009.

• Christoph Quix

  Metadatabase Design for Data Warehouses

  Published in In M.A. Jeusfeld, M. Jarke, J. Mylopoulos (eds.): Metamodeling for Method Engineering, MIT Press 2009, pp. 329-355

• David Kensche, Christoph Quix, Xiang Li, Yong Li, Matthias Jarke

  Generic Schema Mappings for Composition and Query Answering

  Published in Data & Knowledge Engineering, volume 68, issue 7, pp. 599-621, 2009

2008

• P. Kranen, David Kensche, S. Kim, N. Zimmermann, E. Müller, Christoph Quix, Xiang Li, T. Gries, T. Seidl, Matthias Jarke, S. Leonhardt

  Mobile Mining and Information Management in HealthNet Scenarios

  Published in In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Mobile Data Management (MDM 2008), Beijing, China, IEEE Computer Society, pp. 215-216, 2008

2007

• David Kensche, Christoph Quix, Xiang Li, Yong Li

  GeRoMeSuite: A System for Holistic Generic Model Management

  Published in In Proceedings of 33rd International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB'07), pp. 1322-1325, Vienna, 2007