Data exchange with datametadata translations

Data exchange is the process of converting an instance of one schema into an instance of a different schema according to a given specification. Recent data exchange systems have largely dealt with the case where the schemas are given a priori and transformations can only migrate data from the first schema to an instance of the second schema. In particular, the ability to perform data-metadata translations, transformation in which data is converted into metadata or metadata is converted into data, is largely ignored. This paper provides a systematic study of the data exchange problem with data-metadata translation capabilities. We describe the problem, our solution, implementation and experiments. Our solution is a principled and systematic extension of the existing data exchange framework; all the way from the constructs required in the visual interface to specify data-metadata correspondences, which naturally extend the traditional value correspondences, to constructs required for the mapping language to specify data-metadata translations, and algorithms required for generating mappings and queries that perform the exchange. © 2008 VLDB Endowment.