›› 2015, Vol. 30 ›› Issue (1): 214-224.doi: 10.1007/s11390-015-1514-5

Special Issue: Data Management and Data Mining

• Data Management and Data Mining • Previous Articles    

A Clustering Algorithm for Planning the Integration Process of a Large Number of Conceptual Schemas

Carlo Batini1, Paola Bonizzoni1, Marco Comerio1, Riccardo Dondi2, Yuri Pirola1, Francesco Salandra1   

  1. 1 Department of Informatics, Systems and Communication, University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan 20126, Italy;
    2 Department of Human and Social Sciences, University of Bergamo, Bergamo 24129, Italy
  • Received:2013-12-19 Revised:2014-07-29 Online:2015-01-05 Published:2015-01-05
  • About author:Carlo Batini is a full professor of computer engineering at the Department of Informatics, Systems and Communication (DISCo) of the University of Milano-Bicocca. He received his M.S. degree in engineering from the University of Roma. From 1983 to 1986, he was an associate professor, and from 1986 to 2001, he was a full professor at University of Roma La Sapienza. Since 2001 he has been a full professor at University of Milano-Bicocca. From 1993 to August 2003, he was on leave from university, being a member of the executive board of the Italian Authority for Information Technology in Public Administration, where he leaded significant projects in Italian Central Public Administration related to e-Government initiatives. His research interests include cooperative information systems, information systems, database modeling and design, data and information quality, web services design, eGovernment planning methodologies, and services and data repositories.
  • Supported by:

    The work was partially supported by the Italian Project PON01 00861 SMART (Services and Meta-services for smART eGovernment) and by the Project (CUP E41l13000220009) SPAC3 (Smart services of the new Public Administration for the Citizen-Centricity in the Cloud) co-financed by the Lombardy region.

When tens and even hundreds of schemas are involved in the integration process, criteria are needed for choosing clusters of schemas to be integrated, so as to deal with the integration problem through an efficient iterative process. Schemas in clusters should be chosen according to cohesion and coupling criteria that are based on similarities and dissimilarities among schemas. In this paper, we propose an algorithm for a novel variant of the correlation clustering approach that addresses the problem of assisting a designer in integrating a large number of conceptual schemas. The novel variant introduces upper and lower bounds to the number of schemas in each cluster, in order to avoid too complex and too simple integration contexts respectively. We give a heuristic for solving the problem, being an NP hard combinatorial problem. An experimental activity demonstrates an appreciable increment in the effectiveness of the schema integration process when clusters are computed by means of the proposed algorithm w.r.t. the ones manually defined by an expert.

[1] Batini C, Lenzerini M, Navathe S B. A comparative analysis of methodologies for database schema integration. ACM Comput. Surv., 1986, 18(4): 323-364.

[2] Spaccapietra S, Parent C, Dupont Y. Model independent assertions for integration of heterogeneous schemas. The VLDB J., 1992, 1(1): 81-126.

[3] Spaccapietra S, Parent C. View integration: A step forward in solving structural conflicts. IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng., 1994, 6(2): 258-274.

[4] Yang X, Procopiuc C, Srivastava D. Summarizing relational databases. Proc. VLDB Endowment, 2009, 2(1): 634-645.

[5] Wang X, Zhou X,Wang S. Summarizing large-scale database schema using community detection. J. Comput. Sci. Technol., 2012, 27(3): 515-526.

[6] Yasir A, Kumara Swamy M, Krishna Reddy P. Exploiting schema and documentation for summarizing relational databases. In Proc. the 1st Int. Conf. Big Data Analytics, Dec. 2012, pp.77-90.

[7] Algergawy A, Schallehn E, Saake G. A schema matchingbased approach to XML schema clustering. In Proc. the 10th Int. Conf. Information Integration and Web-Based Applications Services, Nov. 2008, pp.131-136.

[8] Lee M L, Yang L H, Hsu W, Yang X. XClust: Clustering XML schemas for effective integration. In Proc. the 11th CIKM, Nov. 2002, pp.292-299.

[9] Batini C, Ceri S, Navathe S B. Conceptual Database Design: An Entity-Relationship Approach (1st edition). Benjamin/ Cummings Publishing Co., 1992.

[10] Jain A K, Murty M N, Flynn P J. Data clustering: A review. ACM Comput. Surv., 1999, 31(3): 264-323.

[11] Moody D L, Flitman A R. A decomposition method for entity relationship models: A systems theoretic approach. In Proc. the 1st Int. Conf. Systems Thinking in Management, Nov. 2000, pp.462-469.

[12] Batini C, Di Battista G, Santucci G. Structuring primitives for a dictionary of entity relationship data schemas. IEEE Trans. Software Engineering, 1993, 19(4): 344-365.

[13] Smith K, Mork P, Seligman L et al. The role of schema matching in large enterprises. In Proc. the 4th Biennial Conf. Innovative Data Systems Research, Jan. 2009.

[14] Nayak R, Iryadi W. XML schema clustering with semantic and hierarchical similarity measures. Knowledge-Based Systems, 2007, 20(4): 336-349.

[15] Banek M, Vrdoljak B, Min Tjoa A, Skocir Z. Automated integration of heterogeneous data warehouse schemas. Int. J. Data Warehousing and Mining, 2008, 4(4): 1-21.

[16] Guerra F, Olaru M O, Vincini M. Mapping and integration of dimensional attributes using clustering techniques. In Proc. the 13th Int. Conf. E-Commerce and Web Technologies, Sept. 2012, pp.38-49.

[17] Mahmoud H A, Aboulnaga A. Schema clustering and retrieval for multi-domain pay-as-you-go data integration systems. In Proc. Int. Conf. Management of Data, Jun. 2010, pp.411-422.

[18] Otham R, Deris S, Illias R, Zakaria Z, Mohamed S. Automatic clustering of gene ontology by genetic algorithm. Int. J. Information Technology, 2006, 3(1): 37-46.

[19] Hu W, Qu Y, Cheng G. Matching large ontologies: A divide-and-conquer approach. Data & Knowledge Engineering, 2008, 67(1): 140-160.

[20] Zhao Y, Karypis G, Fayyad U. Hierarchical clustering algorithms for document datasets. Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, 2005, 10(2): 141-168.

[21] Bansal N, Blum A, Chawla S. Correlation clustering. Machine Learning, 2004, 56(1/2/3): 89-113.

[22] Bonizzoni P, Della Vedova G, Dondi R, Jiang T. On the approximation of correlation clustering and consensus clustering. J. Comput. Syst. Sci., 2008, 74(5): 671-696.

[23] Charikar M, Guruswami V, Wirth A. Clustering with qualitative information. J. Comput. Syst. Sci., 2005, 71(3): 360-383.

[24] Demaine E, Emanuel D, Fiat A, Immorlica N. Correlation clustering in general weighted graphs. Theoretical Computer Science, 2006, 361(2): 172-187.

[25] Papadimitriou C, Steiglitz K. Combinatorial Optimization: Algorithms and Complexity. Dover Publications, 1998.

[26] Ausiello G, Crescenzi P, Gambosi G, Kann V, MarchettiSpaccamela A, Protasi M. Complexity and Approximation: Combinatorial Optimization Problems and Their Approximability Properties (1st edition). Springer-Verlag, 1999.

[27] Batini C, Comerio M, Viscusi G. Managing quality of large set of conceptual schemas in public administration: Methods and experiences. In Proc. the 2nd Int. Conf. Model and Data Engineering, Oct. 2012, pp.31-42.
No related articles found!
Viewed
Full text


Abstract

Cited

  Shared   
  Discussed   
No Suggested Reading articles found!

ISSN 1000-9000(Print)

         1860-4749(Online)
CN 11-2296/TP

Home
Editorial Board
Author Guidelines
Subscription
Journal of Computer Science and Technology
Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences
P.O. Box 2704, Beijing 100190 P.R. China
Tel.:86-10-62610746
E-mail: jcst@ict.ac.cn
 
  Copyright ©2015 JCST, All Rights Reserved