Data integration by conceptual diagrams

Abstract

We present a visual language based approach and tool to perform data integration at conceptual level, aiming to reduce the complexity of such task when integrating numerous and complex data sources. The visual language provides iconic operators to manipulate the constructs of conceptual data schemas of database sources, in order to specify how to merge and map them to a reconciled schema. The proposed tool allows not only to generate the relational reconciled schema, but also to automatically generate metadata and inference mechanisms to guarantee the loading and periodical refresh of data from source databases. Finally, we evaluated CoDIL through a usability study. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.