[seek-dev] Schema matching tool for interface alignment

[Joseph Goguen]

Dear fellow SEEKers,

Our schema matching tool, SCIA, is getting close to ready for beta release.
We have succesfully wrapped an older version as a stand-alone Kepler actor,
so it should be feasible to include it in Kepler as a transformation tool to
translate data between actors in a pipeline having different input/output
requirements.  Issues that remain include: 1) obtaining Kepler support for
actor input/output interface description in DTD/XML Schema, which seems also
needed for work of Bertram and Shawn on semantic annotation for actors (this
relates to the type system of Ptolemy); 2) improve the performance of SCIA in
Kepler; 3) generalize SCIA's schema parsers support more features; (4) decide
whether SCIA should be a hidden actor that is launched when needed, or be
explicitly added to a pipeline by a user pulling it from the actor library;
and (5) develop a set of interesting use cases.

We are pleased that Jianting Zhang at UNM is interested to work with us on
making the tool really useful for ecologists, and we hope that closer
collaborations can be estabalished with other SEEKers to reach this goal.

  -- Joseph Goguen and Jenny Wang