Integration of Heterogeneous Databases Without Common Domains Using Queries Based on Textual Similarity

Most databases contain “name constants” like course numbers, personal names, and place names that correspond to entities in the real world. Previous work in integration of heterogeneous databases has assumed that local name constants can be mapped into an appropriate global domain by normalization. However, in many cases, this assumption does not hold; determining if two name constants should be considered identical can require detailed knowledge of the world, the purpose of the user’s query, or both. In this paper, we reject the assumption that global domains can be easily constructed, and assume instead that the names are given in natural language text. We then propose a logic called WHIRL which reasons explicitly about the similarity of local names, as measured using the vector-space model commonly adopted in statistical information retrieval. We describe an efficient implementation of WHIRL and evaluate it experimentally on data extracted from the World Wide Web. We show tha...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1998
• Where: SIGMOD
• Authors: William W. Cohen
• Keywords: Appropriate Global Domain, Database, Global Domain, Logic Called Whirl, SIGMOD 1998