A unified graph-based framework for deriving nominal interscheme properties, type conflicts and object cluster similarities

The availability of automatic tools for inferring semantics from database schemes is very relevant in designing large cooperative information system applications involving many information sources. Deriving semantics from existing data sources exploits properties of objects belonging to different input schemes (interscheme properties), such as synonymies, homonymies, type conflicts, and subscheme similarities. The paper gives a contribution in this context by proposing a collection of graph based techniques for a uniform derivation of all interscheme properties. All techniques are characterized by a common core consisting of the computation of a maximum weight matching on suitable bipartite graphs. The computation of the maximum weight matching is based on a suitable metrics which is used to measure object semantic similarities. A running example is provided to illustrate the approach.