Flexible dataspace management through model management

The vision of dataspaces has been articulated as providing various of the benefits of classical data integration but with reduced up-front costs, which, combined with opportunities for incremental refinement, enables a "pay as you go" approach to the data integration problem. However, results that seek to realise the vision tend to make design commitments, often to meet quite specific application assumptions, that are likely to restrict their wider use. Instead of precommitting to a specific solution, we build on research in model management and present a generic framework consisting of a collection of types and operations for dataspace management systems that can be instantiated in various ways. The key extension for dataspaces is the integration of user feedback as annotations to model management constructs, and the development of operations that take account of these annotations. The flexibility of the framework is demonstrated through various case studies that meet differing requirements. Copyright 2010 ACM.