Semantic-integration research in the database community: A brief survey

TLDR

Semantic integration has long challenged the database community, attracting steady attention over two decades and becoming a prominent research area, as reviewed in earlier surveys. This article reviews database applications that require semantic integration, discusses the underlying difficulties, and identifies open research issues. The authors focus on schema matching while also addressing data matching, reasoning with matches, verification, repair, and reconciling inconsistent data values.

Abstract

Semantic integration has been a long-standing challenge for the database community. It has received steady attention over the past two decades, and has now become a prominent area of database research. In this article, we first review database applications that require semantic integration and discuss the difficulties underlying the integration process. We then describe recent progress and identify open research issues. We focus in particular on schema matching, a topic that has received much attention in the database community, but also discuss data matching (for example, tuple deduplication) and open issues beyond the match discovery context (for example, reasoning with matches, match verification and repair, and reconciling inconsistent data values). For previous surveys of database research on semantic integration, see Rahm and Bernstein (2001); Ouksel and Seth (1999); and Batini, Lenzerini, and Navathe (1986).