Entity Identification in Database Integration: An Evidential Reasoning Approach

• Main Authors: LIM, Ee Peng, SRIVASTAVA, Jaideep
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 1993
• Subjects: Databases and Information Systems; Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/910; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/1909/viewcontent/EntityIdDBIntegrationEvidentialReApp_1993.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Entity identification is the problem of matching object instances from different databases which correspond to the same real-world entity. In this paper, we present a 2-step entity identification process in which attributes for matching tuples may be missing in certain tuples, and thus need to be derived prior to the matching. To match tuples, we require identity rules which specify the conditions to be satisfied by a pair of tuples, from different databases, before they can be considered as modeling the same real-world entity. We also introduce ILFD's (instance-level functional dependencies) as a form of inference rules which derive the missing identifying attributes. In order to provide more interesting integrated results to the users, we allow both identity rules and ILFD's to contain indefiniteness represented as necessary and possible support information. Based on support logic programming[2], we develop an approach to perform reasoning on the local databases using identity rules ...