On the Expressive Power of Data Integration Systems

There are basically two approaches for designing a data integration system. In the global-as-view (GAV) approach, one maps the concepts in the global schema to views over the sources, whereas in the local-as-view (LAV) approach, one maps the sources into views over the global schema. The goal of this paper is to relate the two approaches with respect to their expressive power. The analysis is carried out in a relational database setting, where both the queries on the global schema, and the views in the mapping are conjunctive queries. We introduce the notion of query-preserving transformation, and query-reducibility between data integration systems, and we show that, when no integrity constraints are allowed in global schema, the LAV and the GAV approaches are incomparable. We then consider the addition of integrity constraints in the global schema, and present techniques for query-preserving transformations in both directions. Finally, we show that our results imply that we can always transform any system following the GLAV approach (a generalization of both LAV and GAV) into a query-preserving GAV