RELATIONAL TO ENTITY-RELATIONSHIP SCHEMA TRANSLATION USING SEMANTIC AND INCLUSION DEPENDENCIES

When a database is to be interoperated with others, its schema must fi rst be converted to the canonical model of the federated system. This implies a knowledge acquisition process to upgrade the semantics of th e local schema. This article addresses the problem of translating rela tional schemas to a semantically rich entity-relationship (ER) model. We introduce a concept called semantic dependency, which we define for mally in both the ER and relational models. We use this concept to sem antically enrich a relational schema before translating it to the corr esponding ER schema. We show that using the concept of semantic depend ency in addition to inclusion dependency, functional dependency, and m ultivalued dependency will result in a more accurate relational to ER schema translation. (C) 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.