On computing the importance of entity types in large conceptual schemas

Abstract

The visualization and the understanding of large conceptual schemas require the use of specific methods. These methods generate clustered, summarized or focused schemas that are easier to visualize and to understand. All of these methods require computing the importance of each entity type in the schema. In principle, the totality of knowledge defined in the schema could be relevant for the computation of that importance but, up to now, only a small part of that knowledge has been taken into account. In this paper, we extend six existing methods for computing the importance of entity types by taking into account all the relevant knowledge defined in the structural and behavioural parts of the schema. We experimentally evaluate the original and the extended versions of those methods with two large real-world schemas. We present the two main conclusions we have drawn from the experiments. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009.