An algebraic framework for merging incomplete and inconsistent views

• Published in: 13th IEEE International Conference on Requirements Engineering (RE'05) pp. 306 - 315
• Main Authors: Sabetzadeh, M., Easterbrook, S.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 2005
• Subjects: Computer science; LAN interconnection; Merging; Performance analysis; Performance gain
• ISBN: 0769524257; 9780769524252
• ISSN: 1090-705X; 2332-6441
• DOI: 10.1109/RE.2005.8

View merging, also called view integration, is a key problem in conceptual modeling. Large models are often constructed and accessed by manipulating individual views, but it is important to be able to consolidate a set of views to gain a unified perspective, to understand interactions between views, or to perform various types of end-to-end analysis. View merging is complicated by inconsistency of views. Once views are merged, it is useful to be able to trace the elements of the merged view back to their sources. In this paper, we propose a framework for merging incomplete and inconsistent graph-based views. We introduce a formalism, called annotated graphs, which incorporates a systematic annotation scheme capable of modeling incompleteness and inconsistency as well as providing a built-in mechanism for stakeholder traceability. We show how structure-preserving maps can capture the relationships between disparate views modeled as annotated graphs, and provide a general algorithm for merging views with arbitrary interconnections. We use the i* modeling language (Yu, 1997) as an example to demonstrate how our approach can be applied to existing graph-based modeling languages.