Tableau techniques for querying information sources through global schemas

Abstract

The foundational homomorphism techniques introduced by Chandra and Merlin for testing containment of conjunctive queries have recently attracted renewed interest due to their central role in information integration applications. We show that generalizations of the classical tableau representation of conjunctive queries are useful for computing query answers in information integration systems where information sources are modeled as views defined on a virtual global schema. We consider a general situation where sources may or may not be known to be correct and complete. We characterize the set of answers to a global query and give algorithms to compute a finite representation of this possibly infinite set, as well as its certain and possible approximations. We show how to rewrite a global query in terms of the sources in two special cases, and show that one of these is equivalent to the Information Manifold rewriting of Levy et al.