Model Management Engine for Data Integration with Reverse-Engineering Support

Model management is a high-level programming language designed to efficiently manipulate schemas and mappings. It is comprised of robust operators that combined in short programs can solve complex metadata-oriented problems in a compact way. For instance, countless enterprise data integration scenarios can be easily expressed in this high-level language thus saving hundreds of development man-hours. Here we present the first model management engine that has reverse-engineering support for data integration, which is one of the most pressing metadata-oriented problems. It merges two schemas based on the mappings between them and allows user to correct the result keeping all the mappings in sync automatically. For user it is much more convenient than determining which mappings to correct in order to get desired result. In addition, the engine supports restructuring merging which is important when the sources are structured differently and cannot be mapped directly. While making schema merging fully automatic is not yet possible, our work simplifies and automates this process to make it practical in complex data integration scenarios.