Towards Model Checking Product Lines in the Digital Humanities: An Application to Historical Data

Rapid development in computing techniques and databases’ systems have aided in the digitization of, and access to, various historical (big) data, with significant challenges of analysis and interoperability. The Death and Burial Data, Ireland project aims to build a Big Data interoperability framework loosely based on the Knowledge Discovery Data (KDD) process to integrate Civil Registration of Death data with other data types collated in Ireland from 1864 to 1922. For our project, we resort to a Document Type Description (DTD) product line to represent and manage various representations and enrichments of the data. Well-formed documents serve as contracts between a provider (of the data set) and its customers (the researchers that consult them). We adopt the Context-Free Modal Transition Systems as a formalism to specify product lines of DTDs. The goal is to then proceed to product line verification using context-free model checking techniques, specifically the M3C checker of [14] to ensure that they are fit for purpose. The goal is to later implement and manage the corresponding family of data models and processes in the DIME framework, leveraging its flexible data management layer to define and efficiently manage the interoperable historical data framework for future use. The resulting hierarchical product line verification will allow our technical platform to act as a high-quality service provider for digital humanities researchers, providing them with a wide range of tailored applications implementing the KDD process, whose essential business rules are easily checked by a standard DTD checker.