An Information Flow Based Approach to Schema Transformations for Information Systems Integration

In information systems integration, whether the instances of a schema of an information system may be recovered from those of another is a question, which seems profound, and yet has not been well investigated. We shed some light on it by using the notion of information carrying relation. In the literature, a conditional probability based approach has been proposed to finding such a relation within a schema transformation setting. To solve the problem of this approach that inter-schemata constraints might not be given in advance, this paper proposes another information flow based approach. Based upon a derivation of information flow constraints, this approach helps us find information carrying relations between conceptual constructs of two schemata.