Schema Evolution publication categorizer

Many challenging problems facing information systems engineering involve
the manipulation of complex metadata artifacts, or models, such as database
schemas, interface specifications, or object diagrams, and mappings between
models. The applications that solve metadata manipulation problems are
complex and hard to build. The goal of generic model management is to
reduce the amount of programming needed to develop such applications by
providing a database infrastructure in which a set of high-level algebraic
operators, such as Match, Merge, and Compose, are applied to models and
mappings as a whole rather than to their individual building blocks.
This dissertation presents an initial study of the concepts and algorithms
for generic model management. We describe the first prototype of a generic
model management system, introduce the algebraic operators that are used to
manipulate models and mappings, clarify the semantics of the operators, and
develop novel algorithms for implementing them. In particular, we present an
innovative algorithm based on fixpoint computation that is used for implementing
the generic operator Match, which finds correspondences between
two models. Using the prototype and the operators presented in the dissertation,
we develop solutions for several practically relevant problems, such as
change propagation and reintegration.