A platform for model-independent solutions to model management problems

Model management is a metadata-based approach to database problems aimed at supporting the productivity of developers by providing schema manipulation operators. Here we propose MISM (Model Independent Schema Management), a platform for model management offering a set of operators to manipulate schemas, in a manner that is both model-independent (in the sense that operators are generic and apply to schemas of different data models) and model-aware (in the sense that it is possible to say whether a schema is allowed for a data model). This is the first proposal for model management in this direction. We consider the main operators in model management: merge, diff, and modelgen. These operators play a major role in solving various problems related to schema evolution (such as data integration, data exchange or forward engineering), and we show in detail a solution to a major representative of the class, the round-trip engineering problem.