On Using Simplification and Correction Tables for Integrity Maintenance in Integrated Databases

When a database is defined as views over autonomous sources, inconsistencies with respect to global integrity constraints are to be expected. This paper investigates the possibility of using simplification techniques for integrity constraints in order to maintain, in an incremental way, a correction table of virtual updates which, if executed, would restore consistency; access can be made through auxiliary views that take the table into account. The approach employs assumptions about local source consistency as well as cross-source constraints whenever possible