Relational to entity-relationship schema translation using semantic and inclusion dependencies

Abstract

When a database is to be interoperated with others, its schema must first be converted to the canonical model of the federated system. This implies a knowledge acquisition process to upgrade the semantics of the local schema. This article addresses the problem of translating relational schemas to a semantically rich entity-relationship (ER) model. We introduce a concept called semantic dependency, which we define formally in both the ER and relational models. We use this concept to semantically enrich a relational schema before translating it to the corresponding ER schema. We show that using the concept of semantic dependency in addition to inclusion dependency, functional dependency, and multivalued dependency will result in a more accurate relational to ER schema translation.