MaRIA: a process to model entity reconciliation problems

Abstract

Within the development of software systems, the development of web applications may be one of the most widespread at present due to the great number of advantages they provide such as: multiplatform, speed of access or the not requiring extremely powerful hardware among others. The fact that so many web applications are being developed, makes enormous the volume of information that it is generated daily. In the management of all this information, the entity reconciliation (ER) problem occurs, which is to identify objects referring to the same real-world entity. This paper proposes to give a solution to this problem through a web perspective based on the Model-Driven Engineering paradigm. To this end, the Navigational Development Techniques (NDT) methodology, that provides a formal and complete set of processes that bring support to the software lifecycle management, has been taken as a reference and it has been extended adding new activities, artefacts and documents to cover the ER. All these elements are defined by a process named Model-Driven Entity ReconcilIAtion (MaRIA), that can be integrated in any software development methodology and allows one to define the ER problem from the early stages of the development. In addition, this proposal has been validated in a real-world case study helping companies to reduce costs when a software product that must give a solution to an ER problem has to be developed