Validation of mappings between data schemas

Resumen

In this thesis, we present a new approach to the validation of mappings between data schemas. It allows the designer to check whether the mapping satisfies certain desirable properties. The feedback that our approach provides to the designer is not only a Boolean answer, but either a (counter)example for the (un)satisfiability of the tested property, or the set of mapping assertions and schema constraints that are responsible for that (un)satisfiability. One of the main characteristics of our approach is that it is able to deal with a very expressive class of relational mapping scenarios; in particular, it is able to deal with mapping assertions in the form of query inclusions and query equalities, and it allows the use of negation and arithmetic comparisons in both the mapping assertions and the views of the schemas; it also allows for integrity constraints, which can be defined not only over the base relations but also in terms of the views. Since reasoning on the class of mapping scenarios that we consider is, unfortunately, undecidable, we propose to perform a termination test as a pre-validation step. If the answer of the test is positive, then checking the corresponding desirable property will terminate. We also go beyond the relational setting and study the application of our approach to the context of mappings between XML schemas.