Description

Schema evolution is the increasingly important ability to adapt deployed schemas to changing requirements. Effective support for schema evolution is challenging since schema changes may have to be propagated, correctly and efficiently, to instance data and dependent schemas, mappings or applications. We introduce the major requirements for effective schema and ontology evolution, including support for a rich set of change operations, simplicity of change specification, evolution transparency (e.g., by providing and maintaining views or schema versions), automated generation of evolution mappings, and predictable instance migration that minimizes data loss and manual intervention. We then give an overview about the current state of the art and recent research results for the evolution of relational schemas, XML schemas, and ontologies. For numerous approaches, we outline how and to what degree they meet the introduced requirements.

For the complete book see Schema Matching and Mapping

BibTex

@incollection{hartung_smm2011,
  author    = {Michael Hartung and
               James F. Terwilliger and
               Erhard Rahm},
  title     = {Recent Advances in Schema and Ontology Evolution},
  booktitle = {Schema Matching and Mapping},
  year      = {2011},
  pages     = {149-190},
  ee        = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-16518-4_6}
}