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Related Work

This page places the transformation vocabulary beside existing work. It is orientation, not a survey.

Vocabularies of Change

PREMIS Preservation Events

The Library of Congress publishes a controlled vocabulary of preservation event types, maintained alongside PREMIS.

Three event types are especially close to transformation operations:

  • migration creates a version in a more contemporary format;
  • normalization creates a version better suited to preservation; and
  • replication creates a bit-wise identical copy.

This is an operation vocabulary for digital objects, as this theory's operators are.

The controlled vocabulary itself is a list of preservation event types rather than a kind → family → operation taxonomy.

SPDX Relationship Types

SPDX 2.x labels relationships between elements, including GENERATES, GENERATED_FROM, ANCESTOR_OF, DESCENDANT_OF, VARIANT_OF, COPY_OF, PATCH_APPLIED, and FILE_MODIFIED.

The distinction between COPY_OF and ANCESTOR_OF / DESCENDANT_OF offers a useful comparison with the distinction between copy (CP) and branch (BR) in this theory.

SPDX labels relationships between artifacts; this theory names transformation operations.

W3C PROV

PROV defines derivation, with revision, quotation, and primary source as specialized kinds of derivation. PROV defines no attributes specific to those derivation subtypes. It records relations between entities rather than organizing transformation operations into kinds and families.

Precedent for Formal Semantics

PRISM Schema Modification Operators

PRISM provides a language of operators for schema changes, tools to evaluate their effects, automatic data migration, query rewriting, and documentation of changes to support provenance.

It builds on theoretical results on mapping composition, invertibility, and query rewriting. It is a particularly relevant precedent for transformation operators with defined effects and algebraic relationships.

Lenses

In programming-language theory and bidirectional transformation research, a lens is a formal abstraction for relating two representations through paired get and put operations.

Well-behaved lenses satisfy round-trip laws and support composition, providing a precedent for giving transformations formal behavioral laws.

Quotient lenses relax the round-trip requirements so that the laws need hold only up to a chosen equivalence, such as one that ignores whitespace. They provide a precedent for stating laws about change modulo an equivalence.

Classifications of Transformation Approaches

Czarnecki and Helsen give a feature model of design choices in model-transformation approaches. Mens and Van Gorp give a taxonomy of model transformation derived from a Dagstuhl working group. The taxonomy was subsequently applied to graph-transformation technology. These works classify transformation languages, tools, techniques, and approaches, rather than kinds of change performed by individual operations.

Contribution

In the (limited search) sources reviewed, we did not find a vocabulary that

  • groups concrete transformation operations into families and kinds, and
  • states explicit, partial composition and orthogonality relations among them.

Open Directions

  • Expand composition and orthogonality rule coverage, including investigating whether split and merge admit a justified orthogonality classification.
  • Investigate a coherence law between composition and orthogonality, including whether absorbing, inverse-like, or redundant composition relations constrain orthogonality.

References