Interactive generation of integrated schemas

Schema integration is the problem of creating a unified target schema based on a set of existing source schemas that relate to each other via specified correspondences. The unified schema gives a standard representation of the data, thus offering a way to deal with the heterogeneity in the sources. In this paper, we develop a method and a design tool that provide: 1) adaptive enumeration of multiple interesting integrated schemas, and 2) easy-to-use capabilities for refining the enumerated schemas via user interaction. Our method is a departure from previous approaches to schema integration, which do not offer a systematic exploration of the possible integrated schemas. The method operates at a logical level, where we recast each source schema into a graph of concepts with Has-A relationships. We then identify matching concepts in different graphs by taking into account the correspondences between their attributes. For every pair of matching concepts, we have two choices: merge them i...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: SIGMOD
• Authors: Laura Chiticariu, Phokion G. Kolaitis, Lucian Popa
• Keywords: Database, Final Integrated Schema, Interesting Integrated Schemas, Possible Integrated Schemas, SIGMOD 2008