STORED DATA DEFINITION AND TRANSLATION APPROACH TO THE DATA PORTABILITY PROBLEM

摘要

The data portability problem is the inability to move data from one system, which has inherently different characteristics in either architecture or software, to another. This problem is costing industry and government millions of dollars each year. One approach to this problem is termed data translation:the process whereby data on one computer is changed into a form that is processable on the same computer with a different software system, or possibly a different computing system.nOur technical approach to data translation embodies the development of two declarative languages which describe stored-data and the transformations among stored-data and the implementation of a data translator which processes the stored-data. A Stored-Data Definition Language (SDDL) is being developed to declare the logical data structure and the physical encoding of its data instances for both the source and target files. A Translation Definition Language (TDL) is used to define how the target data instances are to be derived from the source data instances. The approach of utilizing a procedural component at several points in the SDDL and TDL has been adopted. This essentially allows procedural extension to the language where the high level language approach would be cumbersome or inadequate.