Exploiting schema and documentation for summarizing relational databases

Abstract

Schema summarization approaches are used for carrying out schema matching and developing user interfaces. Generating schema summary for any given database is a challenge which involves identifying semantically correlated elements in a database schema. Research efforts are being made to propose schema summarization approaches by exploiting database schema and data stored in the database. In this paper, we have made an effort to propose an efficient schema summarization approach by exploiting database schema and the database documentation. We propose a notion of table similarity by exploiting referential relationship between tables and the similarity of passages describing the corresponding tables in the database documentation. Using the notion of table similarity, we propose a clustering based approach for schema summary generation. Experimental results on a benchmark database show the effectiveness of the proposed approach. © Springer-Verlag 2012.