Feature-based adaptation of database schemas

A recognized quality of a modern software system is its ability to adapt to changing user needs, user tasks, user skills and context of operation. While recent research results have been achieved in the domain of architectures, requirements and user interfaces, very little attention has been devoted to the adaptation of the data manipulation aspects of the system. However, mobile and pervasive applications impose constraints over the amount of data that can be supported, thus making necessary to adapt the schema to the current context in order to provide only relevant data to the system user. This paper presents a feature-based approach to adapt database schemas according to the changing context conditions. The method allows the derivation of a consistent and sufficient sub-schema starting from the current context. We define and formalize a generic framework, considering two levels of abstraction for database schema specification, and we propose two schema derivation algorithms. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.