View Integration Using the Entity-Relationship Model.:Available in 2 volumes.

Abstract

The development of global conceptual schemas for very large organizations is complex, time consuming and error prone. This thesis presents a view integration methodology which integrates the various user views, expressed originally in entity-relationship model form and transformed into a specially developed language, into one global conceptual schema. The semantics of each additional user view are captured by matching the entity-relationships of that view with those of the global conceptual schema, which is updated accordingly. Two approaches to view integration have been developed: binary view integration which integrates a view at a time, and n-ary view integration which integrates all the views ‘simultaneously’. Further, prototypes of n-ary view integrators called the entity n-ary view integrator and the relationship n-ary view integrator have been developed. The view integrator identifies and resolves conflicts which may take place during view integration. A particular technique called object fuzzy matching was developed to identify some of the possible synonym naming conflicts. Other types of conflicts which are called cross object type conflicts occur when the same semantics are modelled in different user views using different objects or structures. The definitions and resolutions of a number of these conflicts are presented in this thesis.