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.
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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.
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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
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67271-7_9
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