Publication Type
Journal Article
Version
acceptedVersion
Publication Date
2-1996
Abstract
The objective of entity identification is to determine the correspondence between objective instances from more than one database. This paper examines the problem at the instance level assuming that schema level heterogeneity has been resolved a priori. Soundness and completeness are defined as the desired properties of any entity-identification technique. To achieve soundness, a set of identity and distinctness rules have to be established for the entities in the integrated world. We then propose the use of extended key, which is the union of keys (and possibly other attributes) from the relations to be matched, and its corresponding identity rule to determine the equivalence between tuples from relations that may not share any common key. Instance level functional dependencies (ILFD), a form of semantic constraint information about the real-world entities, are used to derive the missing extended key attribute values of a tuple. Formal properties of ILFDs are derived. Results from a Prolog-based prototype entity-identification system are presented.
Discipline
Databases and Information Systems | Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing
Publication
Information Sciences
Volume
89
Issue
1/2
First Page
1
Last Page
38
ISSN
0020-0255
Identifier
10.1016/0020-0255(95)00185-9
Publisher
Elsevier
Citation
LIM, Ee Peng; SRIVASTAVA, Jaideep; PRABHAKAR, Satya; and RICHARDSON, James.
Entity identification in database integration. (1996). Information Sciences. 89, (1/2), 1-38.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/24
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
http://doi.org/10.1016/0020-0255(95)00185-9
Included in
Databases and Information Systems Commons, Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing Commons