Checking Containment of Schema Mappings (Preliminary Report)

In data exchange, data are materialised from a source schema to a target schema, according to suitable source-to-target constraints. Constraints are also expressed on the target schema to represent the domain of interest. A schema mapping is the union of the source-to-target and of the target constraints. In this paper, we address the problem of containment of schema mappings for data exchange, which has been recently proposed in this framework as a step towards the optimization of data exchange settings. We refer to a natural notion of containment that relies on the behaviour of schema mappings with respect to conjunctive query answering, in the presence of so-called LAV TGDs as target constraints. Our contribution is a practical technique for testing the containment based on the existence of a homomorphism between special "dummy" instances, which can be easily built from schema mappings. We argue that containment of schema mappings is decidable for most practical cases, and...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: AMW
• Authors: Andrea Calì, Riccardo Torlone
• Keywords: AMW 2009, AMW 2010, Data Exchange, Schema Mappings, Target Schema