Object Oriented Approach for Integration of Heterogeneous Databases in a Multidatabase System and Local Schemas Modifications Propagation

TL;DR

This paper proposes an object-oriented approach to integrate heterogeneous local databases into a unified global schema, enabling seamless data retrieval and schema evolution management in a multidatabase system.

Contribution

It introduces a novel object-oriented method for schema integration that accounts for heterogeneity, semantic relevance, and schema modifications propagation.

Findings

Global schema provides high location transparency.

Integration operators effectively combine local schemas.

Schema modifications are successfully propagated in the global schema.

Abstract

One of the challenging problems in the multidatabase systems is to find the most viable solution to the problem of interoperability of distributed heterogeneous autonomous local component databases. This has resulted in the creation of a global schema over set of these local component database schemas to provide a uniform representation of local schemas. The aim of this paper is to use object oriented approach to integrate schemas of distributed heterogeneous autonomous local component database schemas into a global schema. The resulting global schema provides a uniform interface and high level of location transparency for retrieval of data from the local component databases. A set of integration operators are defined to integrate local schemas based on the semantic relevance of their classes and to provide a model independent representation of virtual classes of the global schema. The schematic representation and heterogeneity is also taken into account in the integration process. Justifications about Object Oriented Modal are also discussed. Bottom up local schema modifications propagation in Global schema is also considered to maintain Global schema as local schemas are autonomous and evolve over time. An example illustrates the applicability of the integration operator defined.