A Semantically Extended Views Integration Method and Its Application to Pavement Views Integration

Abstract

Due to increasing interest in distributed databases, the importance of schema integration techniques is significantly increasing. It has been realized database design is such a complex task that it can't be performed in a centralized way, therefore, a more reasonable approach is to first allow the different departments of an organization to build their own schema/view of the database and then integrate them to represent the global schema of the complete knowledge. Keeping this view in mind, an integration strategy based on the concept of structural comparison and semantic comparison of schema is proposed.The structural comparison finds out similar or near similar types to mainly ascertain subset relationship. It does not analyze the entities very deeply, therefore, it can't detect other relationships hidden in the structural specification of the types. Hence to circumvent these problems, semantic comparison of the types is also considered. The semantic comparison helps to detect other kinds of hidden relationships such as role relationship, identical relationship and compatible relationship between diverse schema components. After this process, all semantic related components are implicitly merged to get a universal view of the knowledge spread in distributed environment. The whole concept is summed up in the form of an integration algorithm.