A Methodology for Integrating Heterogeneous Databases using a Global Schema

M. Shafique and M.S. Al-Shishtawi (Saudi Arabia)

Keywords

Federated databases, schema integration, and heterogeneous databases.

Abstract

In the process of developing federated database systems, one of the main tasks is integrating various component database schemas. Several methodologies for integrating component schemas can be found in the literature. These methodologies are criticized for being very human labor intensive, for demanding extensive global DBA knowledge, for the difficulty in determining semantically similar objects, and for the difficulty in maintaining the global schema. We present a new methodology for integrating heterogeneous databases using a global schema. It avoids the shortcomings of the methodologies reported in the literature and offers its own advantages. First, missing relationships among access terms do exist naturally in the taxonomy and need to manually derive them no longer exists. Second, semantic knowledge of global objects is derived automatically. Finally, automatic knowledge mapping is achieved.

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