|
Apologies
for slow response to a couple of requests for sources on semantic
incompatibilities.
This is the table we generated internally, based
partly on older database work
|
Semantic Incompatibilities |
|
Naming
Conflicts |
When objects
representing the same concept may contain dissimilar names: conflicts due
to either homonyms or synonyms. |
|
Type
Conflicts |
When the same
concept is represented by different types. |
|
Key
Conflicts |
When different
keys are assigned to the same concept in different schema.
|
|
Behavioural
Conflicts |
When different
insertion/deletion policies are associated with the same class of objects
in different schemata. e.g. deleting an object may leave an ?empty? object
rather than a ?null reference?. |
|
Missing
Data |
When different
attributes are defined for the same concept. |
|
Levels of
Abstraction |
When
information about an entity is stored at dissimilar levels of detail. e.g.
?name? versus ?first_name? and ?last_name?. |
|
Identification of
Related Concepts |
For example,
two entities belonging to two different databases may not be equivalent
but one entity may be a generalisation of the other
entity. |
|
Scaling
Conflicts |
When the same
attribute of an entity is stored in dissimilar
units. |
it is based on/taken from
[1]
Aykut Firat, Information Integration Using Contextual
Knowledge and Ontology Merging. MIT (Sloan School of Management) Ph. D
thesis, September 2003.
[1]
M. P. Reddy, B. E. Prasad, P. G. Reddy,
Amar Gupta, A Methodology for Integration
of Heterogeneous Databases, IEEE Transactions on
Knowledge and Data Engineering, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1994.
There are some other papers dating from the
mid-nineties, but they have not survived my various office moves.
Sean Barker
Bristol
|