A structure based schema integration methodology

The process of integrating the schemas of several databases into an integrated schema is not easy, due to semantic heterogeneities. We present a method/sup 1/ to detect class similarities by following a strategy and applying comparison criteria, that exploits the semantically rich structures of the schemas (previously enriched), along both the generalization/specialization and the aggregation dimensions. Relaxations may be applied to conform a pair of classes, resulting in penalizations in the computation of the degree of similarity. Our approach needs less comparisons than methods based on attribute comparison.<>