Foundations of Data Exchange

The problem of exchanging data between different databases with different schemas is an area of immense importance. Consequently data exchange has been one of the most active research topics in databases over the past decade. Foundational questions related to data exchange largely revolve around three key problems: how to build target solutions; how to answer queries over target solutions; and how to manipulate schema mappings themselves? The last question is also known under the name 'metadata management', since mappings represent metadata, rather than data in the database. In this book the authors summarize the key developments of a decade of research. Part I introduces the problem of data exchange via examples, both relational and XML; Part II deals with exchanging relational data; Part III focuses on exchanging XML data; and Part IV covers metadata management.

Preface; Part I. Getting Started: 1. Data exchange by example; 2. Theoretical background; 3. Data exchange: key definitions; Part II. Relational Data Exchange: 4. The problem of relational data exchange; 5. Existence of solutions; 6. Good solutions; 7. Query answering and rewriting; 8. Alternative semantics; 9. End notes to Part II; Part III. XML Data Exchange: 10. The problem of XML data exchange; 11. Patterns and mappings; 12. Building solutions; 13. Answering tuple queries; 14. XML-to-XML queries; 15. XML data exchange via relations; 16. End notes to Part III; Part IV. Metadata Management: 17. What is metadata management?; 18. Consistency of schema mappings; 19. Mapping composition; 20. Inverting schema mappings; 21. Structural characterizations of schema mapping; 22. End notes to Part IV; References; Index.

Marcelo Arenas is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile. He received his PhD from the University of Toronto in 2005. His research interests are in different aspects of database theory, such as expressive power of query languages, database semantics, inconsistency handling, database design, XML databases, data exchange, metadata management and database aspects of the Semantic Web. He has received an IBM PhD Fellowship (2004), seven best paper awards (PODS 2003, PODS 2005, ISWC 2006, ICDT 2010, ESWC 2011, PODS 2011 and WWW 2012) and an ACM-SIGMOD Dissertation Award Honorable Mention in 2006 for his PhD dissertation 'Design Principles for XML Data'. He has served on multiple program committees, and since 2009 he has been participating as an invited expert in the World Wide Web Consortium.
Pablo Barceló is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chile. He received his PhD from the University of Toronto in 2006. His main research interest is in the area of foundations of data management, in particular, query languages, data exchange, incomplete databases, and, recently, graph databases. He has served on program committees of some of the major conferences in database theory and the theoretical aspects of computer science (PODS, ICDT, CIKM, STACS, SIGMOD).
Leonid Libkin is Professor of Foundations of Data Management in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. He was previously a Professor at the University of Toronto and a member of research staff at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill. He received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1994. His main research interests are in the areas of data management and applications of logic in computer science. He has written four books and over 150 technical papers. He was the recipient of a Marie Curie Chair Award from the EU in 2006, and won four best paper awards. He has chaired programme