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View merging in the presence of incompleteness and inconsistency

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Abstract

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 analysis. View merging is complicated by incompleteness and inconsistency: Stakeholders often have varying degrees of confidence about their statements. Their views capture different but overlapping aspects of a problem, and may have discrepancies over the terminology being used, the concepts being modeled, or how these concepts should be structured. Once views are merged, it is important to be able to trace the elements of the merged view back to their sources and to the merge assumptions related to them. In this paper, we present a framework for merging incomplete and inconsistent graph-based views. We introduce a formalism, called annotated graphs, with a built-in annotation scheme for modeling incompleteness and inconsistency. We show how structure-preserving maps can be employed to express the relationships between disparate views modeled as annotated graphs, and provide a general algorithm for merging views with arbitrary interconnections. We provide a systematic way to generate and represent the traceability information required for tracing the merged view elements back to their sources, and to the merge assumptions giving rise to the elements.

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Notes

  1. The notion of interconnection diagram in category theory is more general than this (cf. e.g. [12]), but the extra generality is unnecessary here.

  2. In the remainder of the paper, with a slight abuse of terminology, we use the term “colimit” to refer to the colimiting object for a given interconnection diagram.

  3. Belnap’s original lattice refers to ! as maybe , ✘ as false , ✔ as true , and

    figure c

    as disagreement .

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Acknowledgments

We thank John Mylopoulos, Renée Miller, Pamela Zave, Sotirios Liaskos, Yijun Yu, Linda Liu, Faye Baron, and Shiva Nejati for helpful discussions. We thank the members of the Formal Methods, Database, and EarlyRE groups at the University of Toronto, as well as the anonymous reviewers of the RE’05 Conference and the RE Journal for their insightful comments. Financial support was provided by NSERC, MITACS, and BUL.

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  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada, M5S 3G4

    Mehrdad Sabetzadeh & Steve Easterbrook

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  1. Mehrdad Sabetzadeh
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Correspondence to Mehrdad Sabetzadeh.

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Sabetzadeh, M., Easterbrook, S. View merging in the presence of incompleteness and inconsistency. Requirements Eng 11, 174–193 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00766-006-0032-y

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