Current speed of data growth has exponentially increased over the past decade, highlighting the need of modern organizations for data discovery systems. Several (automated) schema matching approaches have been proposed to find related data, exploiting different parts of schema information (e.g. data type, data distribution, column name, etc.). However, research showed that single schema matching techniques fails to effectively match schemas, whilst combinatorial schema matching systems show more promise. With the introduction of combinatorial schema matching systems, new challenges arise regarding selection and combining strategies. This research attempts to explore different techniques for determining the importance of each matcher in a combinatorial schema matching system by determining the weights of each matcher and comparing them through a comprehensive evaluation.

Recent times once more informed us on the relevance of capable online collaborative tools. For our online collaborative XML editor, we have looked into technologies for constrained block editing which, obeying schemas such as with XML, permit on- and offline users or agents to add, delete, copy, move, split and merge blocks of text. To that end, we studied the current state of Operational Transformations (OT) and Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDT). Furthermore, after selection of the best-ranking enabling technology, we studied existing CRDT implementations for unstructured texts, and extended a Logoot-based CRDT to implement on-and offline split and merge block support. We designed a proof of concept and created a scientific prototype to deliver a proof of concept stability, reproducibility and convergence. For now, we excluded undo and redo operations. Given these conditions, we deliver emperical evidence of our implementation to converge under all circumstances, including split and acyclic block mergers. Finally, we give an outlook and design recommendations for production implementations, and suggestions for tackling the problem of cyclic references in block mergers.