2.8_repair.pdf

Consistency Management with Repair Actions Christian Nentwich, Wolfgang Emmerich and Anthony Finkelstein Department of Computer Science University College London Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, UK {c.nentwich,w.emmerich,a.finkelstein}@cs.ucl.ac.uk Abstract Comprehensive consistency management requires a strong mechanism for repair once inconsistencies have been de- tected. In this paper we present a repair framework for inconsistent distributed documents. The core piece of the framework is a new method for generating interactive re- pairs from full first order logic formulae that constrain these documents. We present a full implementation of the com- ponents in our repair framework, as well as their applica- tion to the UML and related heterogeneous documents such as EJB deployment descriptors. We describe how our ap- proach can be used as an infrastructure for building higher- level, domain specific frameworks and provide an overview of related work in the database and software development environment community. 1 Introduction Software engineers today make use of many informal and semi-formal notations during development, the UML be- ing the most notable example. Large systems are increas- ingly developed in a distributed fashion, making it neces- sary to provide support for the distribution of development artifacts. The goal of this work is to support software engineers in managing the consistency of their artifacts. Consis- tency management typically encompasses the specification of consistency constraints, consistency checking, and acting on inconsistency, or repair. In previous work on xlinkit [16], we have shown how a tool-independent service built on open, extensible and light-weight web technology can pro- vide a strong consistency checking mechanism. The aim of this paper is to complete the circle and complement xlinkit with a strong, yet light-weight and tool-independent repair mechanism. The main contribution of this paper is a tool-independent framework f