Managing semantic heterogeneity in databases

Modern database management systems essentially solve the problem of accessing and managing large volumes of related data on a single platform, or on a cluster of tightly-coupled platforms. But many problems remain when two or more databases need to work together. A fundamental problem is raised by semantic heterogeneity -the fact that data duplicated across multiple databases is represented differently in the underlying database schemas. This tutorial describes fundamental problems raised by semantic heterogeneity and surveys theoretical frameworks that can provide solutions for them.