What if multiusers wish to reconcile their data?

Abstract

Reconciliation is the process of providing a consistent view of the data imported from different sources. Despite some efforts reported in the literature for providing data reconciliation solutions with asynchronous collaboration, the challenge of reconciling data when multiple users work asynchronously over local copies of the same imported data has received less attention. In this paper, we propose AcCORD, an asynchronous collaborative data reconciliation model based on data provenance. AcCORD is innovative because it supports applications in which all users are required to agree on the data integration in order to provide a single consistent view to all of them, as well as applications that allow users to disagree on the correct data value, but promote collaboration by sharing updates. We also introduce different policies based on provenance for solving conflicts among multiusers’ updates. An experimental study investigates the main characteristics of the policies, showing the efficacy of AcCORD.