Schema Covering: a Step Towards Enabling Reuse in Information Integration

Authors: 
Saha, B; Stanoi, I; Clarkson, KL
Author: 
Saha, B
Stanoi, I
Clarkson, K.A.
Year: 
2010
Venue: 
Proc of ICDE Conference
URL: 
http://dit.unitn.it/~p2p/RelatedWork/Matching/ICDE10-conf-full-578.pdf
Citations: 
15
Citations range: 
10 - 49
AttachmentSize
Saha2010SchemaCoveringaStepTowardsEnablingReuseinInformation.pdf319.77 KB

We introduce schema covering, the problem of identifying
easily understandable common objects for describing large
and complex schemas. Defining transformations between schemas
is a key objective in information integration. However, this
process often becomes cumbersome when the schemas are large
and structurally complex. If such complex schemas can be broken
into smaller and simpler objects, then simple transformations
defined over these smaller objects can be reused to define suitable
transformations among the complex schemas. Schema covering
performs this vital task by identifying a collection of common
concepts from a repository and creating a cover of the complex
schema by these concepts. In this paper, we formulate the
problem of schema covering, show that it is NP-Complete, and
give efficient approximation algorithms for it. A performance
evaluation with real business schemas confirms the effectiveness
of our approach.