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On the complexity of deriving schema mappings from database instances

Published:09 June 2008Publication 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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            • Published in

              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

              Copyright © 2008 ACM

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              Association for Computing Machinery

              New York, NY, United States

              Publication History

              • Published: 9 June 2008

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