Combining a Formal with an Example-driven Approach for Data Integration

Integrating data sources is a general problem in many scenarios. The main problem is the heterogeneity between data sources which were created and developed separately. In the literature there exist many different approaches to solve that problem. Schema integration approaches derive an integrated schema by resolving conflicts on schema and data model level. Another kind of approaches are multidatabase languages and systems which define and verify views on top of example databases. They try to map local data to a predefined, integrated schema. In this paper we investigate how the schema integration approach GIM and the example-driven approach VIBE basing on FRAQL can be combined for a new combined approach. The combined approach benefits from the powerful mapping language FRAQL and the verification feature by using example databases and from the extensional analysis of the GIM approach. We discuss the advantages of such a combined approach and show its potential in many integration scenarios.