Challenges and benchmarks

The lecture building

Though I am slowly adjusting to both the height and the time zone of this place, I still wake up early. This morning it was 5:30 when I decided I was too wide awake to fool myself into thinking that I could sleep any more, especially since I had anyway set my alarm clock for 6:00 to go spinning. It was tough: the class lasted an hour instead of the 45 minutes I am used to, and probably the somewhat thinner air does not help either. The benefit comes afterwards: I did not only feel quite virtuous for having carried my intention through, but also alert and awake.

It has stopped snowing (according to the weather forecast it should be clear and sunny from now on, though quite chilly, with -15 degrees max). They were already busy clearing the paths when I returned from the fitness facilities to my room. Well done!

Research in action. Do not erase!

Bidirectional transformation (BX) is about defining ways to convert back and forth between data models that need to be kept in sync with one another, in such a way that their consistency is guaranteed. An appealing example is a patient database of a hospital and the personnel database of a company: both may contain a record of the overall health of a person, and it can be disastrous if one of them shows an employee to be healthy whereas the other shows that patient to be dead (to give a fairly radical example). Yet it is unthinkable that the two databases are merged into one that is used by both parties: to name just one objection, there is confidential information in each of them that should not be accessible for the other. In this case you transform the data by making sure that the relevant information is consistent and that updates in one data base are correctly propagated to the other, and you do it bidirectionally because such updates may occur on either side. Thus, BX. The same principle applies not just to databases but in many other fields as well, hence the participants from different research (sub)communities.

After-lunch walk

The morning was devoted to the presentation of several challenges that participants had prepared, meaning particular questions or problems within the area of Bidirectional Transformation. I proposed one of those myself, based on the work I have been doing in York. Though the facilities at the Banff Centre are in some ways rather outdated, the building where the lectures are taking place, the TransCanada Pipelines Pavillion (do you want to take a guess who sponsored it?) has a nifty fixed camera installation that allows automatic recording and even live streaming of presentations. Thus, you can see me presenting my stuff here. I was one among six and was allotted 12 minutes for my spiel, but it did draw some interest from the audience; this may lead to some cooperation later this week or after the workshop.

After lunch there was time for a short walk through the sun and snow, then we locked ourselves in again; this time in smaller groups to discuss mutual interests, partially driven by the challenge presentations of the morning. When there are 5 or 10 tools all of which claim to support bidirectional transformation, how do you evaluate whether those claims are justified and which of the tools does the best job? For this it is useful to have some stock examples and benchmarks, and the field of BX is too new to have a generally agreed-upon set of such benchmarks. The discussion group I joined made it its goal to inventorise the need for benchmarks: what should be covered, how should they be presented? Useful stuff in principle, although we will have to wait and see what will come of this in practice: intentions are always good but time is always short.

Some of the tools that are available were demonstrated in the last hour of the afternoon. Again, I took the opportunity to show off what I and others have been doing in the last 10 years, in the form of the GROOVE tool. It's always difficult to judge how this comes across though, expecially at the end of a long day. Typically, if no one asks a question during or after a presentation, that is a bad sign; in this case, I did get a few questions, but the amount of interaction was not overwhelming.

The food is excellent here. Buffet style, but with plenty of choices, many of them quite tasty. Hard to resist! A good reason to keep balancing this with some physical activity. Tomorrow afternoon there will be an excursion to Lake Louise, another of these places of stunning natural beauty. The idea is to take a hike there, if the temperature allows - which it should, unless there is too much wind. That's excuse enough to skip spinning in the morning, though if I'm up early again I may change my mind.