Associativity and commutativity in generic merge

Abstract

A model is a formal description of a complex application artifact, such as a database schema, an application interface, a UML model, an ontology, or a message format. The problem of merging such models lies at the core of many meta data applications, such as view integration, mediated schema creation for data integration, and ontology merging. This paper examines the problem of merging two models given correspondences between them. In particular it concentrates on the associativity and commutativity of Merge, which are crucial properties if Merge is to be composed with other operators. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.