Semantic-Based Mappings

Data translation consists of the task of moving data from a source database to a target database. This task is usually performed by developing mappings, i.e., executable transformations from the source to the target schema. However, it is often the case that a richer description of the target database semantics is available under the form of a con- ceptual schema. We investigate how the mapping process changes when such a rich conceptualization of the target database is available. As a major contribution, we develop a translation algorithm that automati- cally rewrites a mapping from the source database schema to the target conceptual schema into an equivalent mapping from the source schema to the underlying target database schema. Experiments show that our ap- proach scales nicely to complex conceptual schemas and large databases.