Abstract
Current tools allow non-technical users to create systems to store, display, and analyze their data on their own using whatever schema they choose. At the same time, developers of these systems can create generic widgets that may work across any number of domains. Unfortunately, to use a generic widget an end-user (the domain expert) must make their data conform to the schema of the widgets, possibly losing meaningful schema names. This paper presents a solution to this problem in the form of generic widget models (canonical structures), local schemas for domain experts, and an intermediate model (domain structures) that—through the use of mappings between the different models—allows generic functionality while preserving local schema.We present the three user roles in our system: widget developers, domain experts, and domain developers (people who develop and map domain structures). We introduce the concept of canonical structures and show how they are mapped to domain structures. We introduce a new relational query operator for writing queries against canonical structures and show how those queries are rewritten against the domain structures. We also provide an evaluation of the overhead of our system compared to custom code solutions and a modern web development framework.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
C# | Microsoft Docs, https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/csharp
Drupal, http://drupal.org
Extensible Markup Language (XML), https://www.w3.org/XML/
Pooled and Cluster Tables
RDF - Semantic Web Standards, https://www.w3.org/RDF/
Blaha, M.: Patterns of Data Modeling. CRC Press, Boca Raton,FL (jun 2010)
Britell, S., Delcambre, L.M.L., Atzeni, P.: Flexible Information Integration with Local Dominance. Information Modelling and Knowledge Bases XXVI, 21–40 (2014)
Britell, S., Delcambre, L.M.L., Atzeni, P.: Facilitating Data-Metadata Transformation by Domain Specialists in a Web-Based Information System Using Simple Correspondences, pp. 445–459. Springer International Publishing (2016)
Cattell, R., Rick: Scalable SQL and NoSQL data stores. ACM SIGMOD Record 39(4), 12 (may 2011)
Gupta, A., Harinarayan, V., Quass, D.: Generalized projections: A powerful approach to aggregation. In: Proc. 21st VLDB Conf. pp. 11–15 (1995)
Keller, A.M., Jensen, R., Agarwal, S.: Persistence software: bridging object-oriented programming and relational databases. ACM SIGMOD Record 22(2), 523–528 (jun 1993)
Mäkelä, E., Viljanen, K., Alm, O., Tuominen, J., Valkeapää, O., Kauppinen, T., Kurki, J., Sinkkilä, R., Kansala, T., Lindroos, R., Others: Enabling the Semantic Web with Ready-to-Use Web Widgets. In: FIRST. pp. 56–69 (2007)
Miller, R.J., Hernández, M.A., Haas, L.M., Yan, L., Howard Ho, C.T., Fagin, R., Popa, L.: The Clio project. ACM SIGMOD Record 30(1), 78–83 (mar 2001), http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=373626.373713
Nadkarni, P.M., Brandt, C., CS, J., A, S., M, D., WE, H.: Data Extraction and Ad Hoc Query of an Entity–Attribute–Value Database. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association 5(6), 511–527 (nov 1998)
Nowack, B.: Paggr: Linked Data widgets and dashboards. Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web 7(4), 272–277 (dec 2009)
OliveÌA˛, A.: Conceptual modeling of information systems. Springer (2007)
Olivé, A.: Representation of Generic Relationship Types in Conceptual Modeling, pp. 675–691. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, Berlin, Heidelberg (2002)
Wyss, C.M., Robertson, E.L.: A formal characterization of PIVOT/UNPIVOT. In: Proceedings of the 14th ACM international conference on Information and knowledge management - CIKM ’05. p. 602. ACM Press, New York, New York, USA (oct 2005)
Acknowledgements
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.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Britell, S., Delcambre, L.M.L., Atzeni, P. (2017). Web System Development Using Polymorphic Widgets and Generic Schemas. In: Cabot, J., Gómez, C., Pastor, O., Sancho, M., Teniente, E. (eds) Conceptual Modeling Perspectives. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67271-7_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67271-7_9
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-67270-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-67271-7
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)