TITLE:
Formalization of Federated Schema Architectural Style Variability
AUTHORS:
Wilhelm Hasselbring
KEYWORDS:
Federated Database Systems, Software Architecture, Formal Specification, Software Product Fami-lies, Software Variability
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Software Engineering and Applications,
Vol.8 No.2,
February
15,
2015
ABSTRACT: Data integration requires managing
heterogeneous schema information. A federated database system integrates
heterogeneous, autonomous database systems on the schema level, whereby both
local applications and global applications accessing multiple component
database systems are supported. Such a federated database system is a complex
system of systems which requires a well-designed organization at the system and
software architecture level. A specific challenge that federated database
systems face is the organization of schemas into a schema architecture. This
paper provides a detailed, formal investigation of variability in the family of
schema architectures, which are central components in the architecture of
federated database systems. It is shown how the variability of specific
architectures can be compared to the reference architecture and to each other.
To achieve this, we combine the semi-formal object-oriented modeling language
UML with the formal object-oriented specification language Object-Z.
Appropriate use of inheritance in the formal specification, as enabled by
Object-Z, greatly supports specifying and analyzing the variability among the
studied schema architectures. The investigation also serves to illustrate the
employed specification techniques for analyzing and comparing software
architecture specifications.