Foundations of Data Exchange

Book excerpt: The problem of exchanging data between different databases with different schemas is an area of immense importance. Consequently data exchange has been one of the most active research topics in databases over the past decade. Foundational questions related to data exchange largely revolve around three key problems: how to build target solutions; how to answer queries over target solutions; and how to manipulate schema mappings themselves? The last question is also known under the name 'metadata management', since mappings represent metadata, rather than data in the database. In this book the authors summarize the key developments of a decade of research. Part I introduces the problem of data exchange via examples, both relational and XML; Part II deals with exchanging relational data; Part III focuses on exchanging XML data; and Part IV covers metadata management.