Automatic entity extraction from an N-Ary relation: Toward a general law for information decomposition

Abstract

N-ary relations provide a convinient tool for database modeling. In earlier work, we had shown that n-ary relations can be decomposed into simpler, more structured relations in such a way as to save storage space and expedite information retrieval. In this paper we submit the thesis that our proposed decomposition preserves the important information of the original relation, that it preserves the discriminating power of the n-ary relation, and that it permits us to extract entity types from a database instance. Experimentation with this approach on actual databases and its preliminary validation have given encouraging results.