Extracting entity-relationship schemas from relational databases: a form-driven approach

The paper presents a framework for extracting an entity-relationship schema from a set of form model schemas of an operational relational database. Form model schemas gather information, i.e., structural information and constraints among data, extracted from both form structures and instances and then generalized into database semantics using an inference process guided by human activity. The approach uses these schemas to supplement low-level schemas to help reconstruct a conceptual schema, in this case an entity-relationship schema.