Heterogeneous Databases Integration

7.5 Summary

We have presented a three step schema integration methodology with proof of its schema integration rules in terms of information dominance and equivalence in the transformation processes. We have justified the correctness of our proposed schemas integration rules by (1) preserving data semantics between original schema and translated schema to ensure that there is no information loss in our transformation processes and (2) most of these steps are capable of being reversed to recover the original schema via the translated schema.

This chapter proposes a methodology to integrate existing objectrelational database schemas in both relational and object oriented view to facilitate different application requirements. The main objective of this methodology is to integrate existing source schemas to fulfill user requirements with no loss of information. A bottom-up schema integration technique is used to integrate existing object-relational schemas. Frame model metadata, an object-relational data model, is used to capture the semantic conflicts and other high level abstract relationships arising from the integration process.