Facilitating data-metadata transformation by domain specialists in a web-based information system using simple correspondences

We seek to empower domain specialists and non-technical web designers to be able to design and configure their system directly, without necessarily requiring interaction with a software developer or DB specialist. We observe that structured information shown on a web page presents a conceptual model of the information shown; and, that such web pages make a variety of choices regarding whether or not application information is presented in the data (with or without schema labels) or in the metadata (schema). Also, the same application may present the same data in different schemas on different pages. In this paper, we extend our earlier work—on providing generic widgets for structured information that can be easily used and configured by domain specialists—to also include data/metadata transformation. Thus, we put data/metadata transformation (from one conceptual model to another) in the hands of domain specialists without database expertise. The contributions of this paper are: showing how our approach can be used to support data/metadata transformation in both directions and demonstrating this capability in a non-trivial case study. The paper also provides evidence that non-expert users can successfully provide simple correspondences through the results of a small-scale user study.