Formalization of database reverse engineering

Abstract

During the life cycle of an Information System, the original design of the database may be difficult to acquire. The database schema may have been continuously modified and drifted away semantically from the intended design, or perhaps no conceptual modelling method was employed at all. A conceptual schema offers a much richer description of a domain than the database schema, this makes it important for, among other reasons, the maintenance of semantic consistency of the database at runtime. Database reverse engineering involves the retrieval of domain semantics from an existing set of database schemas into a conceptual schema. Though several research works exist on creating database reverse engineering methodologies, the process in itself has never been properly and fully formalised with an emphasis on its correctness. This paper introduces the ongoing research surrounding database reverse engineering and the goal of rendering a formal reverse engineering framework. The expected formalism will be valuable to database and domain experts as a sound foundation for implementing better reverse engineering tools.