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On the complexity of deriving schema mappings from database instances

Published: 09 June 2008 Publication History

Abstract

We introduce a theoretical framework for discovering relationships between two database instances over distinct and unknown schemata. This framework is grounded in the context of data exchange. We formalize the problem of understanding the relationship between two instances as that of obtaining a schema mapping so that a minimum repair of this mapping provides a perfect description of the target instance given the source instance. We show that this definition yields "intuitive" results when applied on database instances derived from each other by basic operations. We study the complexity of decision problems related to this optimality notion in the context of different logical languages and show that, even in very restricted cases, the problem is of high complexity.

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cover image ACM Conferences
PODS '08: Proceedings of the twenty-seventh ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGART symposium on Principles of database systems
June 2008
330 pages
ISBN:9781605581521
DOI:10.1145/1376916
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 09 June 2008

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Author Tags

  1. complexity
  2. data exchange
  3. instance
  4. match
  5. schema mapping

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SIGMOD/PODS '08
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PODS '08 Paper Acceptance Rate 28 of 159 submissions, 18%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 642 of 2,707 submissions, 24%

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