Dataspecer

Summary: Dataspecer is a tool for the management and modeling of data structures. The structures may be mapped to user-provided ontologies and exported into various formats.

A separate website is maintained at https://dataspecer.com/.

Have you ever wondered how software engineers manage to build complex software systems that seamlessly work with one another? The key lies in semantic data modeling - the process of creating conceptual models of problem domain concepts and their relationships. While some may have doubted its usefulness in the past, it’s making a comeback in today’s world of increasingly complex and heterogeneous software and data.

At our research lab, we’re exploring new and innovative ways of using semantic data modeling to improve the efficiency, effectiveness, and consistency of software and data engineering tasks. We’re developing methods and tools that support software and data engineers, data analysts, programmers, and more in building conceptual data models and integrating them into their work.

Our flagship tool, Dataspecer, is a game-changer in the world of data schema design. It automates routine and trivial programming, testing, and documentation work related to data schemas, programming code handling the data, and interoperability between different systems. By understanding the structure and semantics of the data, Dataspecer suggests the correct entities to use and supports generating transformation scripts that convert data between different schemas and serialization formats. It even creates Bikeshed documentation with examples, images, and descriptions, and small prototype web apps working with the data.

Our work is built on the model-driven approach, which breaks data modeling into layers and supports domain conceptual models in a form of ontologies as the starting point of the process. We are proud to collaborate with the Czech government and our university IT department on evaluation and practical real-world application of our research results. DataSpecer, has been a valuable asset in designing data exchange standards and REST services APIs, among many other tasks.

Join us in exploring the exciting world of semantic data modeling, where innovation and efficiency come together to create cutting-edge software systems.

Maintained by

Štěpán Stenchlák

PhD student

Jakub Klímek

Associate professor

Petr Škoda

Researcher

Martin Nečaský

Professor

Latest publications

Research topics

Data on the web

Working with data on the Web is difficult due to numerous issues which an interested data consumer can come across, the main ones being data interoperability issues on various levels of abstraction. To support the ecosystem of data exchange on the Web, we are working on a set of techniques and tools for proper publishing and consumption of data on the Web, which include data cataloging, transformation, querying and visualization tools. We put data-centricity, data semantics and data distribution into the core of our work.