Abstract
We seek to empower domain specialists and non-technical web designers to be able to design and configure their system directly, without necessarily requiring interaction with a software developer or DB specialist. We observe that structured information shown on a web page presents a conceptual model of the information shown; and, that such web pages make a variety of choices regarding whether or not application information is presented in the data (with or without schema labels) or in the metadata (schema). Also, the same application may present the same data in different schemas on different pages. In this paper, we extend our earlier work—on providing generic widgets for structured information that can be easily used and configured by domain specialists—to also include data/metadata transformation. Thus, we put data/metadata transformation (from one conceptual model to another) in the hands of domain specialists without database expertise. The contributions of this paper are: showing how our approach can be used to support data/metadata transformation in both directions and demonstrating this capability in a non-trivial case study. The paper also provides evidence that non-expert users can successfully provide simple correspondences through the results of a small-scale user study.
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Notes
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In our earlier papers, we called it local dominance.
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We use a straightforward translation of the ER model of the domain structures into the relational model.
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This work was supported in part by National Science Foundation grants 0840668 and 1250340. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
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Britell, S., Delcambre, L.M.L., Atzeni, P. (2016). Facilitating Data-Metadata Transformation by Domain Specialists in a Web-Based Information System Using Simple Correspondences. In: Comyn-Wattiau, I., Tanaka, K., Song, IY., Yamamoto, S., Saeki, M. (eds) Conceptual Modeling. ER 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9974. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46397-1_34
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