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id	Vol-3194/award1
wikidataid	Q117344925→Q117344925
title	Techniques for the Analysis of Conceptual Schema
pdfUrl	https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3194/award1.pdf
dblpUrl	https://dblp.org/rec/conf/sebd/CastanoAFP22
volume	Vol-3194→Vol-3194
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Techniques for the Analysis of Conceptual Schema

Techniques for the Analysis of Conceptual Schemas
Silvana Castano1,∗ , Valeria De Antonellis2 , Maria Grazia Fugini3 and
Barbara Pernici3
1
  Università degli Studi di Milano, Department of Computer Science, Via Celoria, 18 - 20133 Milano, Italy
2
  Università degli Studi di Brescia, Italy
3
  Politecnico di Milano, Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, Via Ponzio, 34 -
20133 Milano, Italy


                                        Abstract
                                        The problem of analyzing and classifying conceptual schemas is becoming more and more
                                        important due to the availability of large sets of schemas from existing applications.The purpose
                                        of analysis and classification activities can be that of extracting information on schemas of
                                        legacy systems in order to migrate them to new architectures, to build libraries of reference
                                        conceptual components to be used in building new applications in a given domain, to analyze
                                        large sets of schemas in an organization to identify information flows and possible replication
                                        of data. The paper proposes a set of techniques to be adopted for schema classification
                                        and analysis: indexing techniques to associate a description with a schema, techniques for
                                        abstracting reference conceptual schemas based on schema clustering, and techniques for
                                        schema comparison. The application of these techniques in the context of reuse of conceptual
                                        components is briefly presented.


   We started from the observation that a huge number of database conceptual schemas
were accumulated over years of design activities and that schema analysis activities,
usually performed manually by a schema analyst providing additional information about
the contents of the schema at hand, demanded new techniques for automating as much
as possible the analysis process to be performed on the large scale. The paper proposed
a set of methodological instruments and associated techniques, to be used separately or
in combination, to support a number of schema analysis activities, which are: schema
indexing, to associate descriptors and keywords/features with schemas; schema matching,
to evaluate schema similarity; schema abstraction, to derive abstract representation of
schema contents. Moreover, we proposed a methodology for systematic schema analysis
with the purpose of identifying and abstracting the similar of a set of schemas into
reference components, to be (re)used in database and ontology design.
   The techniques and methodology have been subsequently experimented to analyze a
large inventory of ER schemas of Information Systems in the Italian Public Administration
[1], and the final and consolidated work on schema analysis techniques has been published

SEBD 2022: The 30th Italian Symposium on Advanced Database Systems, June 19-22, 2022, Tirrenia
(PI), Italy
∗
    Corresponding author.
Envelope-Open silvana.castano@unimi.it (S. Castano); valeria.deantonellis@unibs.it (V. D. Antonellis);
mariagrazia.fugini@polimi.it (M. G. Fugini); barbara.pernici@polimi.it (B. Pernici)
Orcid 0000-0002-4991-4984 (S. Castano)
                                       © 2022 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0
                                       International (CC BY 4.0).
    CEUR
    Workshop
    Proceedings
                  http://ceur-ws.org
                  ISSN 1613-0073
                                       CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org)
�on the ACM Transactions on Database Systems [2].
  Since that time, the idea of having a set of techniques for schema and data analysis
on large scale has dramatically gained importance and it has been the starting base
for the development of a new generation of data analysis and data science techniques
dealing with huge datasets of unstructured and textual data for effective data sharing
and exploratory analysis on the global scale in the era of big data and cloud computing.


References
[1] C. Batini, S. Castano, V. D. Antonellis, M. G. Fugini, B. Pernici, Analysis of
    an inventory of information systems in the public administration, Requirements
    Engineering 1(1) (1996) 47–62.
[2] S. Castano, V. D. Antonellis, M. G. Fugini, B. Pernici, Conceptual schema analysis:
    Techniques and applications, ACM Transactions on Database Systems 23(3) (1998)
    286–332.
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