A Probabilistic Approach to Information Retrieval in Heterogeneous Databases
Chatterjee, A., A. Segev · University of North Texas Digital Library (University of North Texas) · 1991
During the post decade, organizations have increased their scope and operations beyond their traditional geographic boundaries. At the same time, they have adopted heterogeneous and incompatible information systems independent of each other without a careful consideration that one day they may need to be integrated. As a result of this diversity, many important business applications today require access to data stored in multiple autonomous databases. This paper examines a problem of inter-database information retrieval in a heterogeneous environment, where conventional techniques are no longer efficient. To solve the problem, broader definitions for join, union, intersection and selection operators are proposed. Also, a probabilistic method to specify the selectivity of these operators is discussed. An algorithm to compute these probabilities is provided in pseudocode.