Building the data warehouse (2nd ed.)
Building the data warehouse (2nd ed.)
Reasoning in description logics
Principles of knowledge representation
Issues and approaches of database integration
Communications of the ACM
Fundamentals of Data Warehouses
Fundamentals of Data Warehouses
Panel: Is Generic Metadata Management Feasible?
VLDB '00 Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases
Information Integration: Conceptual Modeling and Reasoning Support
COOPIS '98 Proceedings of the 3rd IFCIS International Conference on Cooperative Information Systems
A Formal Framework for ER Schema Transformation
ER '97 Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling
Performing and analyzing non-formal inspections of entity relationship diagram (ERD)
Journal of Systems and Software
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This paper concerns the issue of conceptual schema integration and manipulation, i.e., the process of manipulating highly abstract, semantically rich database schemas for the extraction of meaningful and unambiguous results. We propose the use of six fundamental manipulation operations, namely rename, select, project, union, set difference, and intersection. We give their definition and semantics using the Entity-Relationship modeling notation. We argue that in order to preserve the semantics of the ER-schemas before and after the operations are performed, these schemas need to be translated to mathematical formulations; then the manipulation operations can be applied. We use the ALCQI description logic notation which features a rich combination of constructors, powerful enough to express elements of ER-schemas. We show that the resulting knowledge bases, which encapsulate all the knowledge about the ER-schemas, need further structuring to accommodate the semantics of the ER elements. Examples demonstrate the applicability and efficiency of the proposed approach.