Juan-Ramón López, Antoni Olivé. A Framework for the Evolution of Temporal Conceptual Schemas of Information Systems. In Benkt Wangler, Lars Bergman, editors, Advanced Information Systems Engineering, 12th International Conference CAiSE 2000, Stockholm, Sweden, June 5-9, 2000, Proceedings. Volume 1789 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 369-386, Springer, 2000. [doi]
This paper focuses on the problem of information systems evolution. Ideally, changes in the requirements of information systems should be defined and managed at the conceptual schema level, with an automatic propagation down to the logical database schema(s) and application programs. We propose here a framework for the evolution of temporal conceptual schemas of information systems. Our framework uses a reflective architecture with two levels: meta schema and schema, and two loosely coupled information processors, one for each level. We define a temporal minimal meta schema, and we show, using some examples, how to extend this minimal meta schema to support any usual conceptual modeling construct. We also show how the framework can be used to specify schema changes.