In the last few years, a lot of attention has been paid to the specification and subsequent manipulation of schema mappings, a problem which is of fundamental importance in metadata management. There have been many achievements in this area, and semantics have been defined for operators on schema mappings such as composition and inverse. However, little research has been pursued towards providing formal tools to compare schema mappings, in terms of their ability to transfer data and avoid storing redundant information, which has hampered the development of foundations for more complex operators as many of them involve these notions. In this paper, we address the problem of providing foundations for metadata management by developing an order to compare the amount of information transferred by schema mappings. From this order we derive several other criteria to compare mappings, we provide tools to deal with these criteria, and we show their usefulness in defining and studying schema...
Marcelo Arenas, Jorge Pérez, Juan L. Reutte