Entity identification in database integration

The objective of entity identification is to determine the correspondence between object instances from more than one database. Entity identification at the instance level, assuming that schema level heterogeneity has been resolved a priori, is examined. Soundness and completeness are defined as the desired properties of any entity identification technique. To achieve soundness, a set of identity and distinctness rules are established for entities in the integrated world. The use of extended key, which is the union of keys, and possibly other attributes, from the relations to be matched, and its corresponding identify rule are proposed to determine the equivalence between tuples from relations which may not share any common key. Instance level functional dependencies (ILFD), a form of semantic constraint information about the real-world entities, are used to derive the missing extended key attribute values of a tuple