A schema mapping is a high-level specification that describes the relationship between two database schemas. As schema mappings constitute the essential building blocks of data exchange and data integration, an extensive investigation of the foundations of schema mappings has been carried out in recent years. Even though several different aspects of schema mappings have been explored in considerable depth, the study of schema-mapping optimization remains largely uncharted territory to date. In this paper, we lay the foundation for the development of a theory of schema-mapping optimization. Since schema mappings are constructs that live at the logical level of information integration systems, the first step is to introduce concepts and to develop techniques for transforming schema mappings to "equivalent" ones that are more manageable from the standpoint of data exchange or of some other data interoperability task. In turn, this has to start by introducing and studying suitab...
Ronald Fagin, Phokion G. Kolaitis, Alan Nash, Luci