Identification and Reconciliation of Semantic Conflicts Using Metadata

Semantic reconciliation is an important step in determining logical connectivity between a data source (database) and a data receiver (application). Semantic reconciliation is used to determine if the semantics of the data provided by the source is meaningful to the receiver. In this paper we describe an automatic method to establish such semantic agreement through the use of metadata. This work examines the effect of changing data semantics, these changes may occur at the source of the data or they may be changes in the data semantic specifications of the application. Methods are described for detecting these changes and for determining if the database can supply meaningful data to the application. These methods also can be used for semantic reconciliation where an application depends on multiple data sources and for schema integration in heterogeneous database systems.