Identifying object isomerism in multidatabase systems

Abstract

In a multidatabase system that consists of object databases, the same real-world entity can be stored as objects in different databases with incompatible object identifiers. How to identify and integrate these objects representing the same entities such that (a) object duplication in the query result can be avoided, (b) information for the entity can be gathered, and (c) the specialization of multiple classes can be built is an important issue to provide a well structured global object schema and a more informative query result. In this paper, we extend our results on probabilistic query processing and joining relations on incompatible keys to solve the problem. Various data and schema conflicts such as missing data, inconsistent data and domain mismatch which may exist in classes from different databases are considered in the process of identification.