A New Framework for Designing Schema Mappings

Abstract

One of the fundamental tasks in information integration is to specify the relationships, called schema mappings, between database schemas. Schema mappings specify how data structured under a source schema is to be transformed into data structured under a target schema. The design of schema mappings is usually a non-trivial and time-intensive process and the task of designing schema mappings is exacerbated by the fact that schemas that occur in real life tend to be large and heterogeneous. Traditional approaches for designing schema mappings are either manual or performed through a user interface from which a schema mapping is interpreted from correspondences between attributes of the source and target schemas. These correspondences are either specified by the user or automatically derived by applying schema matching on the two schemas.