AcCORD: um modelo colaborativo assíncrono para a reconciliação de dados

Abstract

Reconciliation is the process of providing a consistent view of the data imported from different sources. Despite some efforts reported in the literature for providing data reconciliation solutions with asynchronous collaboration, the challenge of reconciling data when multiple users work asyn- chronously over local copies of the same imported data has received less attention. In this thesis we investigate this challenge. We propose AcCORD, an asynchronous collaborative data reconciliation model. It stores users’ integration decision in logs, called repositories. Repositories keep data prove- nance, that is, the operations applied to the data sources that led to the current state of the data. Each user has her own repository for storing the provenance. That is, whenever inconsistencies among im- ported sources are detected, the user may autonomously take decisions to solve them, and integration decisions that are locally executed are registered in her repository. Integration decisions are shared among collaborators by importing each other’s repositories. Since users may have different points of view, repositories may also be inconsistent. Therefore, AcCORD also introduces several policies that can be applied by different users in order to solve conflicts among repositories and reconcile their integration decisions. Depending on the applied policy, the final view of the imported sources may either be the same for all users, that is, a single integrated view, or result in distinct local views for each of them. Furthermore, AcCORD encompasses a decision integration propagation method, which is aimed to avoid that a user take inconsistent decisions over the same data conflict present in different sources, thus guaranteeing a more effective reconciliation process. AcCORD was validated through performance tests that investigated the proposed policies and through users’ interviews that investigated not only the proposed policies but also the quality of the multiuser reconciliation. The re- sults demonstrated the efficiency and efficacy of AcCORD, and highlighted its flexibility to generate a single integrated view or different local views. The interviews demonstrated different perceptions of the users with regard to the quality of the result provided by AcCORD, including aspects related to consistency, acceptability, correctness, time-saving and satisfaction.